
Glass ^ vl^SS^ 
Book V £-^ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



EGYPT 



ILLUSTRATED BOOKS OF TRAVEL 



WILLIAM ELEROY CUETIS 

"One Irish Summer." Sketches and Descrip- 
tions of Ireland and the Irish. Fully illustrated 
from photographs. |3.50 net; postage, 10 cents. 
" Between the Andes and the Ocean " : An Ac- 
count of an Interesting Journey Down the West 
Coast of South America, from the Isthmus of 
Panama to the Straits of Magellan. 8vo, cloth, 
with many illustrations, $2.50. 

"The Yankees of *he East": Letters on Japan. 
Illustnited. 2 vols., 12mo, cloth, $4.00. 

CLIVE HOLLAND 

"From the North Foreland to Penzance": 

The Ports and Harbors of the South Coast of 
England. Fully illustrated in four colors after 
drawings by Maurice Randall. Royal 8vo, cloth, 
$3.50 net ; postage, 24 cents. 

A. C. INCHBOLD 

"Lisbon and Cintra": With Some Account of 
Other Cities and Historic Sites in Portugal. Fully 
illustrated in four colors, after drawings by Stan- 
ley Inchbold. Royal 8vo, $3.50 net; postage, 
10 cents. 

E. G. KEMP 

"The Face of China": A Remarkable Series of 
Travel Sketches. Illustrated by the Author. 
$6.00 net; postage, 27 cents. 

ALBERT SONNICHSEN 

"Confessions of a Macedonian Bandit." Il- 
lustrated with 16 pictures taken by the Author. 
$1.50 net ; postage, 10 cents. 

COUNT STERNBERG 

"The Barbarians of Morocco." Translated from 
the German by Ethel Peck. Pictures in color 
by Douglas Fox-Pit. $2.00 net; postage, 12 cents. 

RICHARD SUDBURY (CHARLES GIBSON) 

"Two Gentlemen in Touraine." 8vo, cloth, 
illustrated, and with decorative borders. $3.50. 

The Same. Automobile Edition. $1.20 net; 
postage, 10 cents. 



PHILAE PRESENT DAY 



EGYPT 

(LA MORT DE PHILiE) 

BY 

PIERRE LOTI 

TEANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY 

W. p. BAINES 



WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR 
BY A. LAMPLOUGH 




NEW YORK 

DUFFIELD k COMPANY 

1910 



-^ 



4^ 



Copyright, 1909, by 
DUFFIELD & COMPANY 



Published January, 1910 



THE TROW PRESS, NEW YORK 



(gCI.A25Gl09 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGK 

I. A Winter Midnight before the Great Sphinx 1 

II. The Passing of Cairo 15 

III. The Mosques of Cairo 29 

rV. The Hall of the Mummies 41 

V. A Centre of Islam .59 

VI. In the Tombs of the Apis 75 

VII. The Outskirts of Cairo 91 

VIII. Archaic Christianity 103 

IX. The Race of Bronze 117 

X. A Charming Luncheon 129 

XI. The Downfall of the Nile .... 147 

XII. In the Temple of the Goddess of Love and 

Joy 161 

XIII. Modern Luxor 175 

XIV. A Twentieth-Century Evening at Thebes . 191 

V 



vi Contents 



PAGB 



CHAPTER 

XV. Thebes by Night 205 

XVJ. Thebes in Sunlight 221 

XVII. An Audience of Amenophis II. ... 235 

XVIII. At Thebes in the Temple of the Ogress 259 

XIX. A Town Promptly Embellished . . . 275 

XX. The Passing of Vhilm 289 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



PniLiE — Present Day Frontispiece 

The Sphinx from the Desert . . . To face page 10 



A View of the Citadel 



A Cairo Street Scene 



A DisTAi^T View of the Pyramids 



Sunset on the Banks of the Nile 



The Colossi of Memnon 



The Cataract at Assouan 



22 

32 

80 

152 

240 

278 



A WINTER MIDNIGHT BEFORE 
THE GREAT SPHINX 



CHAPTER I 

A WINTER MIDNIGHT BEFORE THE 
GREAT SPHINX 

A NIGHT wondrously clear and of a colour 
unknown to our climate; a place of dreamlike 
aspect, fraught with mystery. The moon of a 
bright silver, which dazzles by its shining, 
illumines a world which surely is no longer 
ours; for it resembles in nothing what may be 
seen in other lands. A world in which every- 
thing is suffused with rosy colour beneath the 
stars of midnight, and where granite symbols 
rise up, ghostlike and motionless. 

Is that a hill of sand that rises yonder? One 
can scarcely tell, for it has as it were no shape, 
no outline; rather it seems like a great rosy 
cloud, or some huge, trembling billow, which 
once perhaps raised itself there, forthwith to 
become motionless for ever. . . . And from 
out this kind of mummified wave a colossal 
human effigy emerges, rose-coloured too, a name- 
less, elusive rose; emerges, and stares with fixed 
eyes and smiles. It is so huge it seems unreal, 
as if it were a reflection cast by some mirror 
hidden in the moon. . . . And behind this mon- 
3 



4 Egypt 

ster face, far away in the rear, on the top of 
those undefined and gently undulating sand- 
hills, three apocalyptic signs rise up against the 
sky, three rose-coloured triangles, regular as the 
figures of geometry, but so vast in the distance 
that they inspire you with fear. They seem to 
be luminous of themselves, so vividly do they 
stand out in their clear rose against the deep 
blue of the star-spangled vault. And this ap- 
parent radiation from within, by its lack of like- 
lihood, makes them seem more awful. 

And all around is the desert; a corner of the 
mournful kingdom of sand. Nothing else is to 
be seen anywhere save those three awful things 
that stand there upright and still — the human 
likeness magnified beyond all measurement, and 
the three geometric mountains; things at first 
sight like exhalations, visionary things, with 
nevertheless here and there, and most of all in 
the features of the vast mute face, subtleties of 
shadow which show that it at least exists, rigid 
and immovable, fashioned out of imperishable 
stone. 

Even had we not known, we must soon have 
guessed, for these things are unique in the world, 
and pictures of every age have made the know- 
ledge of them commonplace: the Sphinx and 
the Pyramids! But what is strange is that 
they should be so disquieting. . . . And this per- 



A Winter Midnight 5 

vading colour of rose, whence comes it, seeing 
that usually the moon tints with blue the things 
it illumines? One would not expect this colour 
either, wdiich, nevertheless, is that of all the 
sands and all the granites of Egypt and Arabia. 
And then too, the eyes of the statue, how often 
had we not seen them? And did we not know 
that they were capable only of their one fixed 
stare? Why is it then that their motionless 
regard surprises and chills us, even while w^e are 
obsessed by the smile of the sealed lips that 
seem to hold back the answer to the supreme 
enigma? . . . 

It is cold, but cold as in our country are the 
fine nights of January, and a wintry mist rises 
low down in the little valleys of the sand. And 
that again we were not expecting; beyond 
question the latest invaders of this country, by 
changing the course of the old Nile, so as to 
water the earth and make it more productive, 
have brought hither the humidity of their own 
misty isle. And this strange cold, this mist, 
light as it still is, seem to presage the end of 
ages, give an added remoteness and finality to 
all this dead past, which lies here beneath us in 
subterranean labyrinths haunted by a thousand 
mummies. 

And the mist, which, as the night advances, 
thickens in the valleys, hesitates to mount to 



6 Egypt 

the great daunting face of the Sphinx; and 
covers it with the merest and most transparent 
gauze; and, hke everything else here to-night, 
this gauze, too, is rose-coloured. And mean- 
while the Sphinx, which has seen the unrolling 
of all the history of the world, attends impas- 
sively the change in Egypt's climate, plunged 
in profound and mystic contemplation of the 
moon, its friend for the last 5000 years. 

Here and there on the soft pathway of the 
sandhills are pigmy figures of men that move 
about or sit squatting as if on the watch; and 
small as they are, low down in the hollows 
and far away, this wonderful silver moon reveals 
even their slightest gestures ; for their white robes 
and black cloaks stand sharply out against the 
monotonous rose of the desert. At times they 
call to one another in a harsh, aspirate tongue, 
and then go off at a run, noiselessly, barefooted, 
with burnous flying, hke moths in the night. 
They lie in wait for the parties of tourists who 
arrive from time to time. For the great symbols, 
during the hundreds and thousands of years 
that have elapsed since men ceased to venerate 
them, have nevertheless scarcely ever been alone, 
especially on nights vnih a full moon. Men 
of all races, of all times, have come to wander 
round them, vaguely attracted by their immen- 
sity and mystery. In the days of the Romans 



A Winter Midnight 7 

they had already become symbols of a lost sig- 
nificance, legacies of a fabulous antiquity, but 
people came curiously to contemplate them, and 
tourists in toga and in peplus carved their names 
on the granite of their bases for the sake of re- 
membrance. 

The tourists who have come to-night, and upon 
whom have pounced the black-cloaked Bedouin 
guides, wear cap and ulster or furred greatcoat; 
their intrusion here seems almost an offence; 
but, alas, such visitors become more numerous in 
each succeeding year. The great town hard by 
— which sweats gold now that men have started 
to buy from it its dignity and its soul — is become 
a place of rendezvous and holiday for the idlers 
and upstarts of the whole world. The modern 
spirit encompasses the old desert of the Sphinx 
on every side. It is true that up to the present 
no one has dared to profane it by building in 
the immediate neighbourhood of the great statue. 
Its fixity and calm disdain still hold some sway, 
perhaps. But little more than a mile away 
there ends a road travelled by hackney carriages 
and tramway cars, and noisy with the delectable 
hootings of smart motor cars; and behind the 
pyramid of Cheops squats a vast hotel to which 
swarm men and women of fashion, the latter 
absurdly feathered, like Redskins at a scalp 
dance; and sick people, in search of purer air; 



8 Egypt 

and consumptive English maidens; and ancient 
English dames, a little the worse for wear, who 
bring their rheumatisms for the treatment of the 
dry winds. 

Passing on our way hither, we had seen this 
road and this hotel and these people in the glare 
of the electric lights, and from an orchestra that 
was playing there we caught the trivial air of a 
popular refrain of the music halls; but when in 
a dip of the ground all this had disappeared, 
what a sense of deliverance possessed us, how 
far off this turmoil seemed! As soon as we 
commenced to tread upon the sand of centuries, 
where all at once our footsteps made no sound, 
nothing seemed to have existence, save only the 
great calm and the religious awe of this world 
into which we were come, of this world with its 
so crushing commentary upon our own, where 
all seemed silent, undefined, gigantic and suffused 
with rose-colour. 

And first there is the pyramid of Cheops, 
whose immutable base we had to skirt on our 
way hither. In the moonlight we could see the 
separate blocks, so enormous, so regular, so even 
in their layers, which lie one above the other 
to infinity, getting ever smaller and smaller, and 
mounting, mounting in diminishing perspective, 
until at last high up they form the apex of 
this giddy triangle. And the pyramid seemed 



A Winter Midnight 9 

to be illumined by some sad dawn of the end of 
the world, a dawn which made ruddy only the 
sands and the granites of earth, and left the 
heavens, pricked with their myriad stars, more 
awful in their darkness. How impossible it is 
for us to conceive the mental attitude of that 
king who, during some half -century, spent the 
lives of thousands and thousands of his slaves 
in the construction of this tomb, in the fond 
and foolish hope of prolonging to infinity the 
existence of his mummy. 

The pyramid once passed there was still a 
short way to go before we confronted the Sphinx, 
in the middle of what our contemporaries have 
left him of his desert. We had to descend the 
slope of that sandhill which looked like a cloud, 
and seemed as if covered with felt, in order to 
preserve in such a place a more complete silence. 
And here and there we passed a gaping black 
hole — an airhole, as it seemed, of the profound 
and inextricable kingdom of mummies, very 
populous still, in spite of the zeal of the 
exhumers. 

As we descended the sandy pathway we were 
not slow to perceive the Sphinx itself, half hill, 
half couchant beast, turning its back upon us in 
the attitude of a gigantic dog, that thought 
to bay the moon; its head stood out in dark 
silhouette, like a screen before the light it seemed 



lo Egypt 

to be regarding, and the lappets of its head- 
gear showed Hke downhanging ears. And then 
gradually, as we walked on, we saw it in profile, 
shorn of its nose — ^flat-nosed like a death's head 
— but having already an expression even when 
seen afar off and from the side; already disdainful 
with thrust-out chin and baffling, mysterious 
smile. And when at length we arrived before 
the colossal visage, face to face with it — without 
however encountering its gaze, which passed high 
above our heads — there came over us at once 
the sentiment of all the secret thought which 
these men of old contrived to incorporate and 
make eternal behind this mutilated mask. 

But in full daylight their great Sphinx is no 
more. It has ceased as it were to exist. It is 
so scarred by time, and by the hands of icono- 
clasts; so dilapidated, broken and diminished, 
that it is as inexpressive as the crumbling 
mummies found in the sarcophagi, which no 
longer even ape humanity. But after the man- 
ner of all phantoms it comes to life again at 
night, beneath the enchantments of the moon. 

For the men of its time whom did it represent? 
King Amenemhat? The Sun God? Who can 
rightly tell? Of all hieroglyphic images it 
remains the one least understood. The un- 
fathomable thinkers of Egypt symbolised every- 
thing for the benefit of the uninitiated under the 



THE SPHINX FROM THE DESERT 



A Winter Midnight ii 

form of awe-inspiring figures of the gods ; and it 
may be, perhaps, that, after having meditated so 
deeply in the shadow of their temples, and sought 
so long the everlasting wherefore of life and 
death, they wished simply to sum up in the smile 
of these closed lips the vanity of the most pro- 
found of our human speculations. . . . It is said 
that the Sphinx was once of striking beauty, 
when harmonious contour and colouring ani- 
mated the face, and it was enthroned at its full 
height on a kind of esplanade paved with long 
slabs of stone. But was it then more sovereign 
than it is to-night in its last decrepitude? 
Almost buried beneath the sand of the Libyan 
desert, which now quite hides its base, it rises at 
this hour like a phantom which nothing solid 
sustains in the air. 
• ..•••• 

It has gone midnight. In little groups the 
tourists of the evening have disappeared; to 
regain perhaps the neighbouring hotel, where 
the orchestra doubtless has not ceased to rage; 
or may be, remounting their cars, to join, in 
some club of Cairo, one of those bridge parties, 
in which the really superior intellects of our time 
delight; some — the stouthearted ones — departed 
talking loudly and with cigar in mouth; others, 
however, daunted in spite of themselves, lowered 
their voices as people instinctively do in church. 



12 Egypt 

And the Bedouin guides, who a moment ago 
seemed to flutter about the giant monument like 
so many black moths — they too have gone, 
made restless by the cold air, which erstwhile 
they had not known. The show for to-night is 
over, and everywhere silence reigns. 

The rosy tint fades on the Sphinx and the 
pyramids; all things in the ghostly scene grow 
visibly paler; for the moon as it rises becomes 
more silvery in the increasing chilliness of mid- 
night. The winter mist, exhaled from the arti- 
ficially watered fields below, continues to rise, 
takes heart and envelops the great mute face 
itself. And the latter persists in its regard of 
the dead moon, preserving still the old disconcert- 
ing smile. It becomes more and more difficult 
to believe that here before us is a real colossus, 
so surely does it seem nothing other than a dilated 
reflection of a thing which exists elsewhere, in 
some other world. And behind in the distance 
are the three triangular mountains. Them, too, 
the fog envelops, till they also cease to exist, and 
become pure visions of the Apocalypse. 

Now it is that little by little an intolerable 
sadness is expressed in those large eyes with 
their empty sockets — for, at this moment, the 
ultimate secret, that which the Sphinx seems to 
have known for so many centuries, but to have 
withheld in melancholy irony, is this: that all 



A Winter Midnight 13 

these dead men and women who sleep in the 
vast necropolis below have been fooled, and the 
awakening signal has not sounded for a single 
one of them; and that the creation of mankind 
— mankind that thinks and suffers — has had no 
rational explanation, and that our poor aspira- 
tions are vain, but so vain as to awaken pity. 



THE PASSING OF CAIRO 



CHAPTER II 

THE PASSING OF CAIRO 

Ragged^ threatening clouds, like those that bring 
the showers of our early spring, hurry across a 
pale evening sky, whose mere aspect makes you 
cold. A wintry wind, raw and bitter, blows 
without ceasing, and brings with it every now 
and then some furtive spots of rain. 

A carriage takes me towards what was once 
the residence of the great Mehemet Ali: by a 
steep incline it ascends into the midst of rocks 
and sand — and already, and almost in a moment, 
we seem to be in the desert; though we have 
scarcely left behind the last houses of an Arab 
quarter, where long-robed folk, who looked half- 
frozen, were muffled up to the eyes to-day. . . . 
Was there formerly such weather as this in this 
country noted for its unchanging mildness? 

This residence of the great sovereign of 
Egypt, the citadel and the mosque which he 
had made for his last repose, are perched like 
eagles' nests on a spur of the mountain chain of 
Arabia, the Mokattam, which stretches out like 
a promontory towards the basin of the Nile, and 
brings quite close to Cairo, so as almost to over- 

17 



1 8 Egypt 

hang it, a little of the desert solitude. And so 
the eye can see from far off and from all sides 
the mosque of Mehemet Ali, with the flattened 
domes of its cupolas, its pointed minarets, its 
general aspect so entirely Turkish, perched high 
up, with a certain unexpectedness, above the 
Arab town which it dominates. The prince 
who sleeps there wished that it should resemble 
the mosques of his fatherland, and it looks as if 
it had been transported bodily from Stamboul. 

A short trot brings us up to the lower gate 
of the old fortress; and, by a natural effect, as 
we ascend, all Cairo, which is near there, seems 
to rise with us: not yet indeed the endless 
multitude of its houses; but at first only the 
thousands of its minarets, which in a few seconds 
point their high towers into the mournful sky, 
and suggest at once that an immense town is 
about to unfold itself under our eyes. 

Continuing to ascend — past the double ram- 
part, the double or triple gates, which all these 
old fortresses possess, we penetrate at length into 
a large fortified courtyard, the crenellated walls 
of which shut out our further view. Soldiers 
are on guard there — and how unexpected are 
such soldiers in this holy place of Egypt! The 
red uniforms and the white faces of the north: 
Enghshmen, billeted in the palace of Mehemet 
Ali! 



The Passing of Cairo 19 

The mosque first meets the eye, preceding the 
palace. And as we approach, it is Stamboul 
indeed — for me dear old Stamboul — \^4iich is 
called to mind; there is nothing, whether in 
the lines of its architecture or in the details of 
its ornamentation, to suggest the art of the Arabs 
— a purer art it may be than this and of which 
many excellent examples may be seen in Cairo. 
No; it is a corner of Turkey into which we are 
suddenly come. 

Beyond a courtyard paved with marble, silent 
and enclosed, which serves as a vast parvis, the 
sanctuary recalls those of Mehmet Fatih or the 
Chah Zade: the same sanctified gloom, into 
which the stained glass of the narrow windows 
casts a splendour as of precious stones ; the same 
extreme distance between the enormous pillars, 
leaving more clear space than in our churches, 
and giving to the domes the appearance of being 
held up by enchantment. 

The walls are of a strange white marble 
streaked with yellow. The ground is com- 
pletely covered with carpets of a sombre red. 
In the vaults, very elaborately wrought, nothing 
but blacks and golds: a background of black 
bestrewn with golden roses, and bordered with 
arabesques like gold lace. And from above hang 
thousands of golden chains supporting the vigil 
lamps for the evening prayers. Here and there 



20 ^gyp^ 

are people on their knees, little groups in robe 
and turban, scattered fortuitously upon the red 
of the carpets, and almost lost in the midst of 
the sumptuous solitude. 

In an obscure corner lies Mehemet Ali. 
the prince adventurous and chivalrous as some 
legendary hero, and withal one of the greatest 
sovereigns of modern history. There he lies 
behind a grating of gold, of complicated design, 
in that Turkish style, already decadent, but still 
so beautiful, which was that of his epoch. 

Through the golden bars may be seen in the 
shadow the catafalque of state, in three tiers, 
covered with blue brocades, exquisitely faded, 
and profusely embroidered with dull gold. Two 
long green palms freshly cut from some date- 
tree in the neighbourhood are crossed before 
the door of this sort of funeral enclosure. And 
it seems that around us is an inviolable religious 
peace. . . . 

But all at once there comes a noisy chattering 
in a Teutonic tongue — and shouts and laughs! 
. . • How is it possible, so near to the great 
flead? . . . And there enters a group of tourists, 
dressed more or less in the approved " smart " 
style. A guide, with a droll countenance, 
recites to them the beauties of the place, 
bellowing at the top of his voice like a show- 
man at a fair. And one of the travellers. 



The Passing of Cairo 21 

stumbling in the sandals which are too large 
for her small feet, laughs a prolonged, silly 
little laugh like the clucking of a turkey. . . . 

Is there then no keeper, no guardian of this 
holy mosque? And amongst the faithful pros- 
trate here in prayer, none who will rise and 
make indignant protest? Who after this will 
speak to us of the fanaticism of the Egyptians? 
. . , Too meek, rather, they seem to me every- 
where. Take any church you please in Europe 
where men go down on their knees in prayer, 
and I should like to see what kind of a wel- 
come would be accorded to a party of Moslem 
tourists who — to suppose the impossible — be- 
haved so badly as these savages here. 

Behind the mosque is an esplanade, and 
beyond that the palace. The palace, as such, 
can scarcely be said to exist any longer, for it 
has been turned into a barrack for the army 
of occupation. English soldiers, indeed, meet us 
at every turn, smoking their pipes in the idle- 
ness of the evening. One of them who does 
not smoke is trying to carve his name with a 
knife on one of the layers of marble at the base 
of the sanctuary. 

At the end of this esplanade there is a kind 
of balcony from which one may see the whole of 
the town, and an unlimited extent of verdant 
plains and yellow desert. It is a favourite view 



22 Egypt 

of the tourists of the agencies, and we meet 
again our friends of the mosque, who have pre- 
ceded us hither — the gentlemen with the loud 
voices, the bellowing guide and the cackling 
lady. Some soldiers are standing there too, 
smoking their pipes contemplatively. But in 
spite of all these people, in spite, too, of the 
wintry sky, the scene which presents itself on 
arrival there is ravishing. 

A very fairyland — but a fairyland quite dif- 
ferent from that of Stamboul. For whereas the 
latter is ranged like a great amphitheatre above 
the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmora, here 
the vast town is spread out simply, in a plain 
surrounded by the solitude of the desert and 
dominated by chaotic rocks. Thousands of 
minarets rise up on every side like ears of corn 
in a field; far away in the distance one can see 
their innumerable slender points — but instead 
of being simply, as at Stamboul, so many white 
spires, they are here complicated by arabesques, 
by galleries, clock-towers and little columns, and 
seem to have borrowed the reddish colour of the 
desert. 

The flat roofs tell of a region which formerly 
was without rain. The innumerable palm-trees 
of the gardens, above this ocean of mosques and 
houses, sway their plumes in the wind, be- 
wildered as it were by these clouds laden with 



A VIEW OF THE CITADEL 



m 






The Passing of Cairo 23 

cold showers. In the south and in the west, 
at the extreme hmits of the view, as if upon the 
misty horizon of the plains, appear two gigantic 
triangles. They are Gizeh and Memphis — the 
eternal pyramids. 

At the north of the town there is a corner 
of the desert quite singular in its character — 
of the colour of bistre and of mummy — where 
a whole colony of high cupolas, scattered at 
random, still stand upright in the midst of sand 
and desolate rocks. It is the proud cemetery of 
the Mameluke Sultans, whose day was done in 
the Middle Ages. 

But if one looks closely, what disorder, what 
a mass of ruins there are in this town — still a 
little fairylike — beaten this evening by the 
squalls of winter. The domes, the holy tombs, 
the minarets and terraces, all are crumbling: 
the hand of death is upon them all. But down 
there, in the far distance, near to that silver 
streak which meanders through the plains, and 
which is the old Nile, the advent of new times 
is proclaimed by the chimneys of factories, 
impudently high, that disfigure everything, and 
spout forth into the twilight thick clouds of 
black smoke. 

The night is falling as we descend from the 
esplanade to return to our lodgings. 

We have first to traverse the old town of 



24 Egypt 

Cairo, a maze of streets still full of charm, 
wherein the thousand little lamps of the Arab 
shops already shed their quiet light. Passing 
through streets which twist at their carprice, 
beneath overhanging balconies covered with 
wooden trellis of exquisite workmanship, we 
have to slacken speed in the midst of a dense 
crowd of men and beasts. Close to us pass 
women, veiled in black, gently mysterious as 
in the olden times, and men of unmoved grav- 
ity, in long robes and white draperies; and 
little donkeys pompously bedecked in collars of 
blue beads; and rows of leisurely camels, with 
their loads of lucerne, which exhale the pleasant 
fragrance of the fields. And when in the gather- 
ing gloom, which hides the signs of decay, there 
appear suddenly, above the little houses, so 
lavishly ornamented with mushrabiyas and ara- 
besques, the tall aerial minarets, rising to a 
prodigious height into the twilight sky, it is still 
the adorable East. 

But nevertheless, what ruins, what filth, what 
rubbish! How present is the sense of impend- 
ing dissolution! And what is this: large pools 
of water in the middle of the road! Granted 
that there is more rain here than formerly, since 
the valley of the Nile has been artificially 
irrigated, it still seems almost impossible that 
there should be all this black water, into which 



The Passing of Cairo 25 

our carriage sinks to the very axles; for it is a 
clear week since any serious quantity of rain fell. 
It wovild seem that the new masters of this land, 
albeit the cost of annual upkeep has risen in 
their hands to the sum of £15,000,000, have 
given no thought to drainage. But the good 
Arabs, patiently and without murmuring, gather 
up their long robes, and with legs bare to the 
knee make their way through this already pesti- 
lential water, which must be hatching for them 
fever and death. 

Farther on, as the carriage proceeds on its 
course, the scene changes little by little. The 
streets become vulgar: the houses of " The 
Arabian Nights " give place to tasteless Levan- 
tine buildings; electric lamps begin to pierce 
the darkness with their wan, fatiguing glare, 
and at a sharp turning the new Cairo is 
before us. 

What is this? Where are we fallen? Save 
that it is more vulgar, it might be Nice, or the 
Riviera, or Interlaken, or any other of those 
towns of carnival whither the bad taste of the 
whole world comes to disport itself in the so- 
called fashionable seasons. But in these quarters, 
on the other hand, which belong to the foreigners 
and to the Egyptians rallied to the civilisation of 
the West, all is clean and dry, well cared for and 
well kept. There are no ruts, no refuse. The 



26 Egypt 

fifteen million pounds have done their work 
conscientiously. 

Everywhere is the blinding glare of the electric 
light ; monstrous hotels parade the sham splendour 
of their painted fa9ades; the whole length of 
the streets is one long triumph of imitation, of 
mud walls plastered so as to look like stone; a 
medley of all styles, rockwork, Roman, Gothic, 
New Art, Pharaonic, and, above all, the pre- 
tentious and the absurd. Innumerable public 
houses overflow with bottles; every alcoholic 
drink, all the poisons of the West, are here turned 
into Egypt with a take-what-you-please. 

And taverns, gambling-dens and houses of ill- 
fame. And parading the side-walks, numerous 
Levantine damsels, who seek by their finery to 
imitate their fellows of the Paris boulevards, but 
who by mistake, as we must suppose, have placed 
their orders with some costumier for performing 
dogs. 

This then is the Cairo of the future, this 
cosmopolitan fair! Good heavens! When will 
the Egyptians recollect themselves, when will 
they realise that their forebears have left to them 
an inalienable patrimony of art, of architecture 
and exquisite refinement; and that, by their 
negligence, one of those towns which used to be 
the most beautiful in the world is falling into 
ruin and about to perish? 



The Passing of Cairo 27 

And nevertheless amongst the young Moslems 
and Copts now leaving the schools there are 
so many of distinguished mind and superior 
intelligence! When I see the things that are 
here, see them ^\dth the fresh eyes of a stranger, 
landed but yesterday upon this soil, impregnated 
with the glory of antiquity, I want to cry out 
to them, with a frankness that is brutal perhaps, 
but with a profound sympathy: 

" Bestir yourselves before it is too late. Defend 
yourselves against this disintegrating invasion — 
not by force, be it understood, not by inhospi- 
tality or ill-humour — but by disdaining this 
Occidental rubbish, this last year's frippery by 
which you are inundated. Try to preserve not 
only your traditions and your admirable Arab 
language, but also the grace and mystery that 
used to characterise your town, the refined 
luxury of your dwelling-houses. It is not a 
question now of a poet's fancy; your national 
dignity is at stake. You are Orientals — I pro- 
nounce respectfully that word, which implies 
a whole past of early civilisation, of unmingled 
greatness — but in a few years, unless you are on 
your guard, you will have become mere Levantine 
brokers, exclusively preoccupied with the price 
of land and the rise in cotton." 



THE MOSQUES OF CAIRO 



CHAPTER III 

THE MOSQUES OF CAIRO 

They are almost innumerable, more than 3000, 
and this great town, which covers some twelve 
miles of plain, might well be called a city of 
mosques. (I speak, of course, of the ancient 
Cairo, of the Cairo of the Arabs. The new 
Cairo, the Cairo of sham elegance and of 
" Semiramis Hotels," does not deserve to be 
mentioned except with a smile.) 

A city of mosques, then, as I was saying. 
They follow one another along the streets, some- 
times two, three, four in a row; leaning one 
against the other, so that their confines become 
merged. On all sides their minarets shoot up 
into the air, those minarets embellished with 
arabesques, carved and complicated with the 
most changing fancy. They have their little 
balconies, their rows of little columns; they are 
so fashioned that the daylight shows through 
them. Some are far away in the distance; others 
quite close, pointing straight into the sky above 
our heads. No matter where one looks — as far 
as the eye can see — still there are others; all 
of the same familiar colour, a brown turning 

31 



32 Egypt 

into rose. The most ancient of them, those of 
the old easy-tempered times, bristle with shafts 
of wood, placed there as resting places for the 
great free birds of the air, and vultures and 
ravens may always be seen perched there, con- 
templating the horizon of the sands, the line of 
the yellow solitudes. 

Three thousand mosques ! Their great straight 
w^alls, a little severe perhaps, and scarcely pierced 
by their tiny ogive windows, rise above the 
height of the neighbouring houses. These walls 
are of the same brown colour as the minarets, 
except that they are painted with horizontal 
stripes of an old red, which has been faded by 
the sun; and they are crowned invariably with 
a series of trefoils, after the fashion of battle- 
ments, but trefoils which in every case are dif- 
ferent and surprising. 

Before the mosques, Mdiich are raised like 
altars, there is always a flight of steps with a 
balustrade of white marble. From the door one 
gets a glimpse of the calm interior in deep 
shadow. Once inside there are corridors, as- 
tonishingly lofty, sonorous and enveloped in a 
kind of half gloom; immediately on entering 
one experiences a sense of coolness and per- 
vading peace; they prepare you as it were, and 
you begin to be filled with a spirit of devotion, 
and instinctively to speak low. In the narrow 



A CAIRO STREET SCENE 



The Mosques of Cairo 






street outside there was the clamorous uproar 
of an Oriental crowd, cries of sellers, and the 
noise of humble old-world trading; men and 
beasts jostled you; there seemed a scarcity of 
air beneath those so numerous overhanging 
mushrabiyas. But here suddenly there is si- 
lence, broken only by the vague murmur of 
prayers and the sweet songs of birds; there is 
silence too, and the sense of open space, in the 
holy garden enclosed within high walls; and 
again in the sanctuary, resplendent in its quiet 
and restful magnificence. Few people as a rule 
frequent the mosques, except of course at the 
hours of the five services of the day. In a few 
chosen corners, particularly cool and shady, 
some greybeards isolate themselves to read from 
morning till night the holy books and to ponder 
the thought of approaching death: they may be 
seen there in their white turbans, with their white 
beards and grave faces. And there may be, too, 
some few poor homeless outcasts, who are come 
to seek the hospitality of Allah, and sleep, 
careless of the morrow, stretched to their full 
length on mats. 

The peculiar charm of the gardens of the 
mosques, which are often very extensive, is that 
they are so jealously enclosed within their high 
walls — crowned always with stone trefoils — 
which completely shut out the hubbub of the 



34 Egypt 

outer world. Palm-trees, which have grown 
there for some hundred years perhaps, rise from 
the ground, either separately or in superb 
clusters, and temper the light of the always hot 
sun on the rose-trees and the flowering hibiscus. 
There is no noise in the gardens, any more than 
in the cloisters, for people walk there in sandals 
and with measured tread. And there are Edens, 
too, for the birds, who live and sing therein in 
complete security, even during the services, 
attracted by the little troughs which the imams 
fill for their benefit each morning with water 
from the Nile. 

As for the mosque itself it is rarely closed on 
all sides as are those in the countries of the more 
sombre Islam of the north. Here in Egypt 
— since there is no real winter and scarcely ever 
any rain — one of the sides of the mosque is left 
completely open to the garden; and the sanctu- 
ary is separated from the verdure and the roses 
only by a simple colonnade. Thus the faithful 
grouped beneath the palm-trees can pray there 
equally as well as in the interior of the mosque, 
since they can see, between the arches, the 
holy Mihrab.^ 

1 The Mihrab is a kind of portico indicating the direction of 
Mecca. It is placed at the end of each mosque, as the altar is 
in our churches, and the faithful are supposed to face it when 
they pray. 



The Mosques of Cairo 35 

Oh! this sanctuary seen from the silent 
garden, this sanctuary in which the pale gold 
gleams on the old ceiling of cedarwood, and 
mosaics of mother-of-pearl shine on the walls as 
if they were embroideries of silver that had been 
hung there. 

There is no faience as in the mosques of 
Turkey or of Iran. Here it is the triumph of 
patient mosaic. Mother-of-pearl of all colours, 
all kinds of marble and of porphyry, cut into 
myriads of little pieces, precise and equal, and 
put together again to form the Arab designs, 
which, never borrowing from the human form, 
nor indeed from the form of any animal, recall 
rather those infinitely varied crystals that may 
be seen under the microscope in a flake of snow. 
It is always the Mihrab which is decorated with 
the most elaborate richness; generally little 
columns of lapis lazuli, intensely blue, rise in 
relief from it, framing mosaics so delicate that 
they look like brocades or fine lace. In the old 
ceilings of cedarwood, where the singing birds 
of the neighbourhood have their nests, the golds 
mingle with some most exquisite colourings, 
which time has taken care to soften and to blend 
together. And here and there very fine and 
long consoles of sculptured wood seem to fall, as 
it were, from the beams and hang upon the walls 
like stalactites; and these consoles, too, in past 



36 Egypt 

times, have been carefully coloured and gilded. 
As for the columns, always dissimilar, some of 
amaranth-coloured marble, others of dark green, 
others again of red porphyry, with capitals of 
every conceivable style, they are come from far, 
from the night of the ages, from the religious 
struggles of an earlier time and testify to the 
prodigious past which this valley of the Nile, 
narrow as it is, and encompassed by the desert, 
has known. They were formerly perhaps in the 
temples of the pagans, or have known the strange 
faces of the gods of Egypt and of ancient Greece 
and Rome; they have been in the churches of 
the early Christians, or have seen the statues of 
tortured martyrs, and the images of the trans- 
figured Christ, crowned with the Byzantine 
aureole. They have been present at battles, at 
the downfall of kingdoms, at hecatombs, at sacri- 
leges; and now brought together promiscuously 
in these mosques, they behold on the walls 
of the sanctuary simply the thousand little 
designs, ideally pure, of that Islam which wishes 
that men when they pray should conceive Allah 
as immaterial, a Spirit without form and without 
feature. 

Each one of these mosques has its sainted 
dead, whose name it bears, and who sleeps by its 
side, in an adjoining mortuary kiosk; some priest 
rendered admirable by his virtues, or perhaps a 



The Mosques of Cairo 37 

khedive of earlier times, or a soldier, or a martyr. 
And the mausoleum, which communicates with 
the sanctuary by means of a long passage, some- 
times open, sometimes covered with gratings, is 
surmounted always by a special kind of cupola, 
a very high and curious cupola, which raises 
itself into the sky like some gigantic dervish hat. 
Above the Arab town, and even in the sand of 
the neighbouring desert, these funeral domes 
may be seen on every side adjoining the old 
mosques to which they belong. And in the 
evening, when the light is failing, they suggest 
the odd idea that it is the dead man himself, 
immensely magnified, who stands there beneath 
a hat that is become immense. One can pray, 
if one wishes, in this resting place of the dead 
saint as well as in the mosque. Here indeed 
it is always more secluded and more in shadow. 
It is more simple, too, at least up to the height of 
a man: on a platform of white marble, more or 
less worn and yellowed by the touch of pious 
hands, nothing more than an austere catafalque 
of similar marble, ornamented merely with a 
Cufic inscription. But if you raise your eyes to 
look at the interior of the dome — the inside, as 
it were, of the strange dervish hat — you will see 
shining between the clusters of painted and 
gilded stalactites a number of windows of ex- 
quisite colouring, little windows that seem to be 



38 Egypt 

constellations of emeralds and rubies and sap- 
phires. And the birds, you may be sure, have 
their nests also in the house of the holy one. 
They are wont indeed to soil the carpets and 
the mats on which the worshippers kneel, and 
their nests are so many blots up there amid 
the gildings of the carved cedarwood; but then 
their song, the symphony that issues from that 
aviary, is so sweet to the living who pray and to 
the dead who dream. . . . 
• .....» 

But yet, when all is said, these mosques seem 
somehow to be wanting. They do not wholly 
satisfy you. The access to them perhaps is too 
easy, and one feels too near to the modern 
quarters of the town, where the hotels are full 
of visitors — so that at any moment, it seems, 
the spell may be broken by the entry of a batch 
of Cook's tourists, armed with the inevitable 
Baedeker, Alas! they are the mosques of 
Cairo, of poor Cairo, that is invaded and pro- 
faned. The memory turns to those of Morocco, 
so jealously guarded, to those of Persia, even 
to those of Old Stamboul, where the shroud of 
Islam envelops you in silence and gently bows 
your shoulders as soon as you cross their 
thresholds. 

And yet what pains are being taken to-day 
to preserve these mosques, which in olden times 



The Mosques of Cairo 39 

were such delightful retreats. Neglected for 
whole centuries, never repaired, notwithstanding 
the veneration of their heedless worshippers, the 
greater part of them were fallen into ruin; the 
fine woodwork of their interiors had become 
worm-eaten, their cupolas were cracked and 
their mosaics covered the floor as with a hail 
of mother-of-pearl, of porphyry and marble. It 
seemed that to repair all this was a task in- 
capable of fulfilment; it was sheer folly, people 
said, to conceive the idea of it. 

Nevertheless, for nearly twenty years now an 
army of workers has been at the task, sculptors, 
marble-cutters, mosaicists. Already certain of 
the sanctuaries, the most venerable of them 
indeed, have been entirely renovated. After 
having re-echoed for some years to the sounds 
of hammers and chisels, during the course of 
these vast renovations, they are restored now 
to peace and to prayer, and the birds have re- 
commenced to build their nests in them. 

It will be the glory of the present reign that 
it has preserved, before it was too late, all this 
magnificent legacy of Moslem art. When 
the city of " The Arabian Nights," which was 
formerly here, shall have entirely disappeared, to 
give place to a vulgar entrepot of commerce and 
of pleasure, to which the plutocracy of the whole 
world comes every winter to disport itself, so 



40 Egypt 

much at least will remain to bear testimony to 
the lofty and magnificent thought that inspired 
the earlier Arab life. These mosques will con- 
tinue to remain into the distant future, even 
when men shall have ceased to pray in them, 
and the winged guests shall have departed, for 
the want of those troughs of water from the 
Nile, filled for them by the good imams, whose 
hospitality they repay by making heard in the 
courts, beneath the arched roofs, beneath the 
ceilings of cedarwood, the sweet, piping music 
of birds. 



THE HALL OF 
THE MUMMIES 



CHAPTER IV 

THE HALL OF THE MUMMIES 

There are two of us, and as we light our way 
by the aid of a lantern through these vast halls 
we might be taken for a night watch on its 
round. We have just shut behind us and 
doubly locked the door by which we entered, 
and we know that we are alone, rigorously 
alone, although this place is so vast, with its 
endless, communicating halls, its high vestibules 
and great flights of stairs ; mathematically alone, 
one might almost say, for this palace that we 
are in is one quite out of the ordinary, and all 
its outlets were closed and sealed at nightfall. 
Every night indeed the doors are sealed, on 
account of the priceless relics that are collected 
here. So we shall not meet with any hving 
being in these halls to-night, spite of their vast 
extent and endless turnings, and in spite too 
of all these mysterious things that are ranged 
on every side and fill the place with shadows 
and hiding places. 

Our round takes us first along the ground 
floor over flagstones that resound to our foot- 
steps. It is about ten of the clock. Here and 

43 



44 Egypt 

there through some stray window gleams a small 
patch of luminous blue sky, lit by the stars 
which for the good folk outside lend trans- 
parency to the night; but here, none the less, 
the place is filled with a solemn gloom, and we 
lower our voices, remembering perhaps the dead 
that fill the glass cases in the halls above. 

And these things which line the walls on 
either side of us as we pass also seem to be 
in the nature of receptacles for the dead. For 
the most part they are sarcophagi of granite, 
proud and indestructible: some of them, in 
the shape of gigantic boxes, are laid out in line 
on pedestals; others, in the form of mummies, 
stand upright against the walls and display 
enormous faces, surmounted by equally enormous 
head-dresses. Assembled there they look like 
a lot of malformed giants, with oversized heads 
sunk curiously in their shoulders. There are, 
besides, some that are merely statues, colossal 
figures that have never held a corpse in their 
interiors; these all wear a strange, scarcely per- 
ceptible smile; in their huge sphinxlike head- 
gear they reach nearly to the ceiling and their 
set stare passes high above our heads. And 
there are others that are not larger than our- 
selves, some even quite little, with the stature 
of gnomes. And, every now and then, at some 
sudden turning, we encounter a pair of eyes of 



The Hall of the Mummies 4.5 

enamel, wdde-open eyes, that pierce straight into 
the depths of ours, that seem to follow us as we 
pass and make us shiver as if by the contact 
of a thought that comes from the abysm of the 
ages. 

We pass on rapidly, however, and somewhat 
inattentively, for our business here to-night is 
not with these simulacra on the ground floor, 
but with the more redoubtable hosts above. 
Besides our lantern sheds so little light in these 
great halls that all these people of granite and 
sandstone and marble appear only at the precise 
moment of our passage, appear only to dis- 
appear, and, spreading their fantastic shadows 
on the walls, mingle the next moment with 
the great mute crowd, that grows ever more 
numerous behind us. 

Placed at intervals are apparatus for use in 
case of fire, coils of hose and standpipes that 
shine with the warm glow of burnished copper, 
and I ask my companion of the watch: '* What 
is there that could burn here? Are not these 
good people all of stone?" And he answers: 
" Not here indeed ; but consider how the things 
that are above would blaze." Ah! yes. The 
" things that are above " — which are indeed the 
object of my visit to-night. I had not thought 
of fire catching hold in an assembly of mummies ; 
of the old withered flesh, the dead, dry hair, the 



46 Egypt 

venerable carcasses of kings and queens, soaked 
as they are in natron and oils, crackling like so 
many boxes of matches. It is chiefly on account 
of this danger indeed that the seals are put upon 
the doors at nightfall, and that it needs a special 
favour to be allowed to penetrate into this place 
at night with a lantern. 

In the daytime this " Museum of Egyptian 
Antiquities " is as vulgar a thing as you can 
conceive, filled though it is with priceless 
treasures. It is the most pompous, the most 
outrageous of those buildings, of no style at all, 
by which each year the New Cairo is enriched; 
open to all who care to gaze at close quarters, in 
a light that is almost brutal, upon these august 
dead, who fondlj^ thought that they had hidden 
themselves for ever. 

But at night! . . . Ah! at night when all the 
doors are closed, it is the palace of nightmare 
and of fear. At night, so say the Arab guardians, 
who would not enter it at the price of gold — no, 
not even after offering up a prayer — at night, 
horrible " forms " escape, not only from the em- 
balmed bodies that sleep in the glass cases above, 
but also from the great statues, from the papyri, 
and the thousand and one things that, at the 
bottom of the tombs, have long been impregnated 
with human essence. And these " forms " are 
like unto dead bodies, and sometimes to strange 



The Hall of the Mummies 47 

beasts, even to beasts that crawl. And, after 
having wandered about the halls, they end by 
assembling for their nocturnal conferences on the 
roofs. 

We next ascend a staircase of monumental 
proportions, empty in its whole extent, where 
we are delivered for a little while from the 
obsession of those rigid figures, from the stares 
and smiles of the good people in white stone and 
black granite who throng the galleries and vesti- 
bules on the ground floor. None of them, to be 
sure, will follow us; but all the same they guard 
in force and perplex with their shadows the only 
way by which we can retreat, if the formidable 
hosts above have in store for us too sinister a 
welcome. 

He to whose courtesy I owe the relaxation of 
the orders of the night is the illustrious savant 
to whose care has been entrusted the direction of 
the excavations in Egyptian soil; he is also the 
comptroller of this vast museum, and it is he 
himself who has kindly consented to act as my 
guide to-night through its mazy labyrinth. 

Across the silent halls above we now proceed 
straight towards those of whom I have demanded 
this nocturnal audience. 

To-night the succession of these rooms, filled 
with glass cases, which cover more than four 
hundred yards along the four sides of the build- 



48 Egypt 

ing, seems to be without end. After passing, 
in turn, the papyri, the enamels, the vases that 
contain human entrails, we reach the mummies 
of the sacred beasts: cats, ibises, dogs, hawks, 
all with their mummy cloths and sarcophagi; 
and monkeys, too, that remain grotesque even 
in death. Then commence the human masks, 
and, upright in glass-fronted cupboards, the 
mummy cases in which the body, swathed in 
its mummy cloths, was moulded, and which 
reproduced, more or less enlarged, the figure of 
the deceased. Quite a lot of courtesans of the 
Greco-Roman epoch, moulded in paste in this 
wise after death and crowned with roses, smile 
at us provokingly from behind their windows. 
Masks of the colour of dead flesh alternate with 
others of gold which gleam as the light of our 
lantern plays upon them momentarily in our 
rapid passage. Their eyes are always too large, 
the eyelids too wide open and the dilated pupils 
seem to stare at us with alarm. Amongst these 
mummy cases and these coffin lids fashioned in 
the shape of the human figure, there are some 
that seem to have been made for giants; the 
head especially, beneath its cumbrous head-dress 
the head stuffed as it were between the hunch- 
back shoulders, looks enormous, out of all 
proportion to the body which, towards the feet, 
narrows like a scabbard. 



The Hall of the Mummies 4.9 

Although our httle lantern maintains its light 
we seem to see here less and less: the darkness 
around us in these vast rooms becomes almost 
overpowering — and these are the rooms, too, that, 
leading one into the other, facilitate the midnight 
promenade of those dread " forms " which, every 
evening, are released and roam about. . . . 

On a table in the middle of one of these rooms 
a thing to make you shudder gleams in a glass 
box, a fragile thing that failed of life some two 
thousand years ago. It is the mummy of a 
human embryo, and someone, to appease the 
malice of this born-dead thing, had covered its 
face with a coating of gold — for, according to the 
belief of the Egyptians, these little abortions 
became the evil genii of their families if proper 
honour was not paid to them. At the end of its 
negligible body, the gilded head, with its great 
foetus eyes, is unforgettable for its suffering ugli- 
ness, for its frustrated and ferocious expression. 

In the halls into which we next penetrate 
there are veritable dead bodies ranged on either 
side of us as we pass; their coffins are displayed 
in tiers one above the other; the air is heavy 
with the sickly odour of mummies; and on the 
ground, curled always like some huge serpent, 
the leather hoses are in readiness, for here indeed 
is the danger spot for fire. 

And the master of this strange house whispers 



50 Egypt 

to me: " This is the place. Look! There they 



are." 



In truth I recognise the place, having often 
come here in the daytime, like other people. In 
spite of the darkness, which commences at some 
ten paces from us — so small is the circle of light 
cast by our lantern — I can distinguish the double 
row of the great royal coffins, open without 
shame in their glass cases. And standing against 
the walls, upright, like so many sentinels, are 
the coffin lids, fashioned in the shape of the 
human figure. 

We are there at last, admitted at this un- 
seasonable hour into the guest-chamber of kings 
and queens, for an audience that is private 
indeed. 

And there, first of all, is the woman with the 
baby, upon whom, without stopping, we throw 
the light of our lantern. A w^oman who died in 
giving to the world a little dead prince. Since 
the old emb aimers no one has seen the face of 
this Queen Makeri. In her coffin there she 
is simply a tall female figure, outlined beneath 
the close-bound swathings of brown-coloured 
bandages. At her feet lies the fatal baby, 
grotesquely shrivelled, and veiled and mysterious 
as the mother herself; a sort of doll, it seems, 
put there to keep her eternal company in the 
slow passing of endless years. 



The Hall of the Mummies 51 

More fearsome to approach is the row of 
unswathed mummies that follow. Here, in each 
coffin over which we bend, there is a face which 
stares at us — or else closes its eyes in order that 
it may not see us; and meagre shoulders and 
lean arms, and hands with overgrown nails that 
protrude from miserable rags. And each royal 
mummy that our lantern lights reserves for us a 
fresh surprise and the shudder of a different fear 
— they resemble one another so little. Some of 
them seem to laugh, showing their yellow teeth; 
others have an expression of infinite sadness and 
suffering. Sometimes the faces are small, refined 
and still beautiful despite the pinching of the 
nostrils ; sometimes they are excessively enlarged 
by putrid swelling, with the tip of the nose 
eaten away. The embalmers, we know, were 
not sure of their means, and the mummies were 
not always a success. In some cases putrefac- 
tion ensued, and corruption and even sudden 
hatchings of larvse, those " companions without 
ears and without eyes," which died indeed in time 
but only after they had perforated all the flesh. 

Hard by are ranked according to dynasty, and 
in chronological order, the proud Pharaohs in 
a piteous row: father, son, grandson, great- 
grandson. And common paper tickets tell their 
tremendous names, Seti I., Ramses II., Seti II., 
Ramses III., Ramses IV. . . . Soon the muster 



52 Egypt 

will be complete, with such energy have men 
dug in the heart of the rocks to find them all; 
and these glass cases will no doubt be their 
final resting place. In olden days, however, they 
made many pilgrimages after their death, for 
in the troubled times of the history of Egypt it 
was one of the harassing preoccupations of the 
reigning sovereign to hide, to hide at all costs, 
the mummies of his ancestors, which filled the 
earth increasingly, and which the violators of 
tombs were so swift to track. Then they were 
carried clandestinely from one grave to another, 
raised each from his own pompous sepulchre, to 
be buried at last together in some humble and 
less conspicuous vault. But it is here, in this 
museum of Egyptian antiquities, that they are 
about to accomplish their return to dust, which 
has been deferred, as if by miracle, for so many 
centuries. Now, stripped of their bandages, 
their days are numbered, and it behoves us to 
hasten to draw these physiognomies of three 
or four thousand years ago, which are about to 
perish. 

In that coffin — the last but one of the row on 
the left — it is the great Sesostris himself who 
awaits us. We know of old that face of ninety 
years, with its nose hooked like the beak of a 
falcon; and the gaps between those old man's 
teeth; the meagre, birdlike neck, and the hand 



The Hall of the Mummies 53 

raised in a gesture of menace. Twenty years have 
elapsed since he was brought back to the hght, 
this master of the world. He was wrapped 
thousands of times in a marvellous winding-sheet, 
woven of aloe fibres, finer than the muslin of 
India, which must have taken years in the 
making and measured more than 400 yards 
in length. The unswathing, done in the pres- 
ence of the Khedive Tewfik and the great per- 
sonages of Egypt, lasted two hours, and after 
the last turn, when the illustrious figure ap- 
peared, the emotion amongst the assistants was 
such that they stampeded like a herd of cattle, 
and the Pharaoh was overturned. He has, 
moreover, given much cause for conversation, 
this great Sesostris, since his installation in the 
museum. Suddenly one day with a brusque 
gesture, in the presence of the attendants, who 
fled howling with fear, he raised that hand which 
is still in the air, and w^hich he has not deigned 
since to lower. ^ And subsequently there super- 
vened, beginning in the old yellowish-w^hite 
hair, and then sw^arming over the whole body, 
a hatching of cadaveric fauna, which necessitated 
a complete bath in mercury. He also has his 
paper ticket, pasted on the end of his box, and 

^ This movement is explained by the action of the sun, which, 
falling on the unclothed arm, is supposed to have expanded 
the bone of the elbow. 



54 Egypt 

one may read there, written in a careless hand, 
that name which once caused the whole world 
to tremble — " Ramses II. (Sesostris) "! It need 
not be said that he has greatly fallen away and 
blackened even in the fifteen years that I have 
known him. He is a phantom that is about to 
disappear; in spite of all the care lavished upon 
him, a poor phantom about to fall to pieces, 
to sink into nothingness. We move our lantern 
about his hooked nose, the better to decipher, 
in the play of shadow, his expression, that still 
remains authoritative. . . . To think that once 
the destinies of the world were ruled, without 
appeal, by the nod of this head, which looks 
now somewhat narrow, under the dry skin and 
the horrible whitish hair. What force of will, 
of passion and colossal pride must once have 
dwelt therein! Not to mention the anxiety, 
which to us now is scarcely conceivable, but 
which in his time overmastered all others — the 
anxiety, that is to say, of assuring the mag- 
nificence and inviolability of sepulture! . . . . 
And this horrible scarecrow, toothless and senile, 
lying here in its filthy rags, with the hand 
raised in an impotent menace, was once the 
brilliant Sesostris, the master of kings, and by 
virtue of his strength and beauty the demigod 
also, whose muscular limbs and deep athletic 
chest many colossal statues at Memphis, at 



The Hall of the Mummies 55 

Thebes, at Luxor, reproduce and try to make 
eternal. . . . 

In the next coffin lies his father, Seti I., who 
reigned for a much shorter period, and died much 
younger than he. This youthfulness is apparent 
still in the features of the mummy, which are 
impressed besides with a persistent beauty. 
Indeed this good King Seti looks the picture of 
calm and serene reverie. There is nothing 
shocking in his dead face, with its long closed 
eyes, its delicate lips, its noble chin and un- 
blemished profile. It is soothing and pleasant 
even to see him sleeping there with his hands 
crossed upon his breast. And it seems strange, 
that he, who looks so young, should have for 
son the old man, almost a centenarian, who lies 
beside him. 

In our passage we have gazed on many 
other royal mummies, some tranquil and some 
grimacing. But, to finish, there is one of them 
(the third coffin there, in the row in front of 
us), a certain Queen Nsitanebashru, whom I 
approach with fear, albeit it is mainly on her 
account that I have ventured to make this 
fantastical round. Even in the da3i;ime she 
attains to the maximum of horror that a 
spectral figure can evoke. What will she be 
like to-night in the uncertain light of our Httle 
lantern? 



56 Egypt 

There she is indeed, the dishevelled vampire, 
in her place right enough, stretched at full 
length, but looking always as if she were about 
to leap up; and straightway I meet the sidelong 
glance of her enamelled pupils, shining out of 
half -closed eyelids, with lashes that are still al- 
most perfect. Oh! the terrifying person! Not 
that she is ugly, on the contrary we can see 
that she was rather pretty and was mummied 
young. What distinguishes her from the others 
is her air of thwarted anger, of fury, as it were, 
at being dead. The embalmers have coloured 
her very religiously, but the pink, under the 
action of the salts of the skin, has become de- 
composed here and there and given place to a 
number of green spots. Her naked shoulders, 
the height of the arms above the rags which 
were once her splendid shroud, have still a certain 
sleek roundness, but they, too, are stained with 
greenish and black splotches, such as may be seen 
on the skins of snakes. Assuredly no corpse, 
either here or elsewhere, has ever preserved such 
an expression of intense life, of ironical, im- 
placable ferocity. Her mouth is twisted in a 
little smile of defiance; her nostrils pinched like 
those of a ghoul on the scent of blood, and her 
eyes seem to say to each one who approaches: 
" Yes, I am laid in my coffin; but you will very 
soon see I can get out of it." There is some- 



The Hall of the Mummies 57 

thing confusing in the thought that the menace 
of this terrible expression, and this appearance 
of ill-restrained ferocity had endured for some 
hundreds of years before the commencement of 
our era, and endured to no purpose in the secret 
darkness of a closed coffin at the bottom of some 
doorless vault. 

Now that we are about to retire, what will 
happen here, with the complicity of silence, in 
the darkest hours of the night? Will they re- 
main inert and rigid, all these embalmed bodies, 
once left to themselves, who pretended to be so 
quiet because we were there? What exchanges 
of old human fluid will recommence, as who can 
doubt they do each night between one coffin and 
another. Formerly these kings and queens, in 
their anxiety as to the future of their mummy, 
had foreseen violation, pillage and scattering 
amongst the sands of the desert, but never this: 
that they would be reunited one day, almost all 
unveiled, so near to one another under panes of 
glass. Those who governed Egypt in the lost 
centuries and were never known except by 
history, by the papyri inscribed with hieroglyph- 
ics, brought thus together, how many things 
will they have to say to one another, how many 
ardent questions to ask about their loves, about 
their crimes ! As soon as we shall have departed, 
nay, as soon as our lantern, at the end of the 



58 Egypt 

long galleries, shall seem no more than a foolish, 
vanishing spot of fire, will not the " forms," of 
whom the attendants are so afraid, will they 
not start their nightly rumblings and in their 
hollow mummy voices, whisper, with difficulty, 
words? . . . 

Heavens! How dark it is! Yet our lantern 
has not gone out. But it seems to grow darker 
and darker. And at night, when all is shut up, 
how one smells the odour of the oils in which 
the shrouds are saturated, and, more intolerable 
still, the sickly stealthy stench, almost, of all these 
dead bodies! . . . 

As I traverse the obscurity of these endless 
halls, a vague instinct of self-preservation induces 
me to turn back again, and look behind. And 
it seems to me that already the woman with the 
baby is slowly raising herself, with a thousand 
precautions and stratagems, her head still com- 
pletely covered. While farther down, that dis- 
hevelled hair. . . . Oh ! I can see her well, sitting 
up with a sudden jerk, the ghoul with the enamel 
eyes, the lady Nsitanebashru ! 



A CENTRE OF ISLAM 



CHAPTER V 

A CENTRE OF ISLAM 

" To learn is the duty of every Moslem." 

Verse from the Hadith or Words of the Prophet. 

In a narrow street, hidden in the midst of the 
most ancient Arab quarters of Cairo, in the very- 
heart of a close labyrinth mysteriously shady, 
an exquisite doorway opens into a wide space 
bathed in sunshine; a doorway formed of two 
elaborate arches, and surmounted by a high 
frontal on which intertwined arabesques form 
wonderful rosework, and holy writings are 
enscrolled with the most ingenious complica- 
tions. 

It is the entrance to El-Azhar, a venerable 
place in Islam, whence have issued for nearly a 
thousand years the generations of priests and 
doctors charged with the propagation of the 
word of the Prophet amongst the nations, from 
the Mohreb to the Arabian Sea, passing through 
the great deserts. About the end of our tenth 
century the glorious Fatimee Caliphs built this 
immense assemblage of arches and columns, 
which became the seat of the most renowned 
6i 



62 Egypt 

Moslem university in the world. And since 
then successive sovereigns of Egypt have vied 
with one another in perfecting and enlarging it; 
adding new halls, new galleries, new minarets, 
till they have made of El-Azhar almost a town 

within a town. 

• •••••• 

" He who seeks instruction is more loved of God than he 

who fights in a holy war." 

A verse from the Hadith. 

Eleven o'clock on a day of burning sunshine 
and dazzling light. El-Azhar still vibrates with 
the murmur of many voices, although the lessons 
of the morning are nearly finished. 

Once past the threshold of the double or- 
namented door we enter the courtyard, at this 
moment empty as the desert and dazzling with 
sunshine. Beyond, quite open, the mosque 
spreads out its endless arcades, which are con- 
tinued and repeated till they are lost in the 
gloom of the far interior, and in this dim place, 
with its perplexing depths, innumerable people 
in turbans, sitting in a close crowd, are singing, 
or rather chanting, in a low voice, and marking 
time as it were to their declamation by a slight 
rhythmic swaying from the hips. They are the 
ten thousand students come from all parts of 
the world to absorb the changeless doctrine of 
El-Azhar. 



A Centre of Islam 63 

At the jfirst view it is difficult to distinguish 
them, for they are far down in the shadow, and 
out here we are almost blinded by the sun. In 
little attentive groups of from ten to twenty, 
seated on mats around a grave professor, they 
docilely repeat their lessons, which in the course 
of centuries have grown old without changing 
like Islam itself. And we wonder how those in 
the circles down there, in the aisles at the bottom 
where the daylight scarcely penetrates, can see 
to read the old difficult writings in the pages of 
their books. 

In any case, let us not trouble them — as so 
many tourists nowadays do not hesitate to do; 
we will enter a little later, when the studies of 
the morning are over. 

This court, upon which the sun of the fore- 
noon now pours its white fire, is an enclosure 
severely and magnificently Arab; it has isolated 
us suddenly from time and things; it must lend 
to the Moslem prayer what formerly our Gothic 
churches lent to the Christian. It is vast as a 
tournament list; confined on one side by the 
mosque itself, and on the others by a high wall 
which effectively separates it from the outer 
world. The walls are of a reddish hue, burnt by 
centuries of sun into the colour of raw sienna or 
of bloodstone. At the bottom they are straight, 
simple, a little forbidding in their austerity, but 



64 Egypt 

their summits are elaborately ornamented and 
crowned with battlements, which show in profile 
against the sky a long series of denticulated 
stonework. And over this sort of reddish fret- 
work of the top, which seems as if it were there 
as a frame to the deep blue vault above us, we 
see rising up distractedly all the minarets of the 
neighbourhood; and these minarets are red- 
coloured too, redder even than the jealous walls, 
and are decorated with arabesques, pierced by 
the daylight and complicated with aerial gal- 
leries. Some of them are a little distance 
away; others, startlingly close, seem to scale the 
zenith; and all are ravishing and strange, with 
their shining crescents and outstretched shafts 
of wood that call to the great birds of space. 
Spite of ourselves we raise our heads, fascinated 
by all the beauty that is in the air; but there 
is only this square of marvellous sky, a sort 
of limpid sapphire, set in the battlements of 
El - Azhar and fringed by those audacious 
slender towers. We are in the religious East 
of olden days and we feel how the mystery 
of this magnificent court — whose architectural 
ornament consists merely in geometrical de- 
signs repeated to infinity, and does not com- 
mence till quite high up on the battlements, 
where the minarets point into the eternal blue 
— must cast its spell upon the imagination 



A Centre of Islam 65 

of the young priests who are being trained 
here. 



"He who instructs the ignorant is like a living man amongst 
the dead." 

"If a day passes without my having learnt something which 
brings me nearer to God, let not the dawn of that day be blessed." 

Verses from the Hadith. 

He who has brought me to this place to-day 
is my friend, Mustapha Kamel Pacha/ the 
tribune of Egypt, and I owe to his presence the 
fact that I am not treated Hke a casual visitor. 
Our names are taken at once to the great master 
of El-Azhar, a high personage in Islam, whose 
pupil Mustapha formerly was, and who no doubt 
will receive us in person. 

It is in a hall very Arab in its character, 
furnished only with divans, that the great master 
welcomes us, wdth the simplicity of an ascetic 
and the elegant manners of a prelate. His look, 
and indeed his whole face, tell how onerous is 
the sacred office which he exercises: to preside, 
namely, at the instruction of these thousands of 
young priests, who afterwards are to carry faith 
and peace and immobility to more than three 
hundred millions of men. 

And in a few moments ^lustapha and he are 

1 This happened a year before the death of the pacha to whom 
this book is dedicated. — Author* s Note. 



66 Egypt 

busy discussing — as if it were a matter of actual 
interest — a controversial question concerning the 
events which followed the death of the Prophet, 
and the part played by Ali. ... In that mo- 
ment how my good friend Mustapha, whom I 
had seen so French in France, appeared all at 
once a Moslem to the bottom of his soul! The 
same thing is true indeed of the greater num- 
ber of these Orientals, who, if we meet them in 
our own country, seem to be quite parisianised ; 
their modernity is only on the surface: in their 
inmost souls Islam remains intact. And it is 
not difficult to understand, perhaps, how the 
spectacle of our troubles, our despairs, our 
miseries, in these new ways in which our lot is 
cast, should make them reflect and turn again 
to the tranquil dream of their ancestors. . . . 

While waiting for the conclusion of the morn- 
ing studies, we are conducted through some of 
the dependencies of El-Azhar. Halls of every 
epoch, added one to another, go to form a little 
labyrinth; many contain Mihrabs, which, as we 
know already, are a kind of portico, festooned 
and denticulated till they look as if covered with 
rime. And library after library, with ceilings of 
cedarwood, carved in times when men had more 
leisure and more patience. Thousands of pre- 
cious manuscripts, dating back some hundreds of 
years, but which here in El-Azhar are no whit 



A Centre of Islam 67 

out of date. Open, in glass cases, are numerous 

inestimable Korans, which in olden times had 

been written fair and illuminated on parchment 

by pious khedives. And, in a place of honour, 

a large astronomical glass, through which men 

watch the rising of the moon of Ramadan. . . . 

All this savours of the past. And what is being 

taught to-day to the ten thousand students of 

El-Azhar scarcely differs from what w^as taught 

to their predecessors in the glorious reign of the 

Fatimites — and which was then transcendent and 

even new: the Koran and all its commentaries; 

the subtleties of syntax and of pronunciation; 

jurisprudence; calligraphy, which still is dear to 

the heart of Orientals; versification; and, last of 

all, mathematics, of which the Arabs were the 

inventors. 

Yes, all this savours of the past, of the dust of 

remote ages. And though, assuredly, the priests 

trained in this thousand-year-old university may 

grow to men of rarest soul, they will remain, 

these calm and noble dreamers, merely laggards, 

safe in their shelter from the whirlwind which 

carries us along. 

• *••••• 

**It is a sacrilege to prohibit knowledge. To seek knowledge 
is to perform an act of adoration towards God; to instruct is to 
do an act of charity." 

"Knowledge is the life of Islam, the column of faith." 

Verses from the Hadith. 



68 Egypt 

The lesson of the morning is now finished and 
we are able, without disturbing anybody, to visit 
the mosque. 

When we return to the great courtyard, with 
its battlemented walls, it is the hour of recrea- 
tion for this crowd of young men in robes and 
turbans, who now emerge from the shadow of 
the sanctuary. 

Since the early morning they have remained 
seated on their mats, immersed in study and 
prayer, amid the confused buzzing of their thou- 
sands of voices ; and now they scatter themselves 
about the contiguous Arab quarters until such 
time as the evening lessons commence. They 
walk along in little groups, sometimes holding 
one another's hands like children; most of them 
carry their heads high and raise their eyes to 
the heavens, although the sun which greets 
them outside dazzles them a little with its rays. 
They seem innumerable, and as they pass show 
us faces of the most diverse types. They come 
from all quarters of the world; some from 
Baghdad, others from Bassorah, from Mossul 
and even from the interior of Hedjaz. Those 
from the north have eyes that are bright and 
clear; and amongst those from Moghreb, from 
Morocco and the Sahara, are many whose skins 
are almost black. But the expression of all the 
faces is alike : something of ecstasy and of aloof- 



A Centre of Islam 69 

ness marks them all; the same detachment, a 
preoccupation with the self-same dream. And 
in the sky, to which they raise their eyes, the 
heavens — framed always by the battlements of 
El-Azhar — are almost white from the excess of 
light, with a border of tall, red minarets, which 
seem to be aglow with the reflection of some 
great fire. And, watching them pass, all these 
young priests or jurists, at once so different and 
so alike, we understand better than before how 
Islam, the old, old Islam, keeps still its cohesion 
and its power. 

The mosque in which they pursue their studies 
is now almost empty. In its restful twilight 
there is silence, and the unexpected music of 
little birds; it is the brooding season and the 
ceilings of carved wood are full of nests, which 
nobody disturbs. 

A world, this mosque, in which thousands of 
people could easily find room. Some hundred 
and fifty marble columns, brought from ancient 
temples, support the arches of the seven parallel 
aisles. There is no light save that which comes 
through the arcade opening into the courtyard, 
and it is so dark in the aisles at the far end 
that we wonder again how the faithful can see 
to read when the sun of Egypt happens to be 
veiled. 

Some score of students, who seem almost lost 



JO Egypt 

in the vast solitude, still remain during the hour 
of rest, and are busy sweeping the floor with long 
palms made into a kind of broom. These are 
the poor students, whose only meal is of dry 
bread, and who at night stretch themselves to 
sleep on the same mat on which they have sat 
studying during the day. 

The residence at the university is free to all 
the scholars, the cost of their education and 
maintenance being provided by pious donations. 
But, inasmuch as the bequests are restricted 
according to nationality, there is necessarily 
inequality in the treatment doled out to the 
different students : thus the young men of a given 
country may be almost rich, possessing a room 
and a good bed; while those of a neighbouring 
country must sleep on the ground and have 
barely enough to keep body and soul together. 
But none of them complain, and they know how 
to help one another.^ 

Near to us, one of these needy students is 
eating, without any false shame, his midday 
meal of dry bread; and he welcomes with a 
smile the sparrows and the other little winged 
thieves who come to dispute with him the 
crumbs of his repast. And farther down, in the 
dimly lighted vaults at the end, is one who dis- 

1 The duration of the studies at El-Azhar varies from three 
to six years. 



A Centre of Islam 71 

dains to eat, or who, maybe, has no bread; who, 
when his sweeping is done, reseats himself on his 
mat, and, opening his Koran, commences to read 
aloud wdth the customary intonation. His voice, 
rich and facile, and moderated with discretion, 
has a charm that is irresistible in the sonorous 
old mosque, where at this hour the only other 
sound is the scarcely perceptible twittering of the 
little broods above, among the dull gold beams of 
the ceiling. Those who have been familiar with 
the sanctuaries of Islam know, as well as I, that 
there is no book so exquisitely rhythmical as 
that of the Prophet. Even if the sense of the 
verses escape you, the chanted reading, which 
forms part of certain of the offices, acts upon 
you by the simple magic of its sounds, in the 
same way as the oratorios which draw tears in 
the churches of Christ. Rising and falling like 
some sad lullaby, the declamation of this young 
priest, with his face of visionary, and garb of 
decent poverty, swells involuntarily, till gradu- 
ally it seems to fill the seven deserted aisles of 
El-Azhar. 

We stop in spite of ourselves, and listen, in 
the midst of the silence of midday. And in this 
so venerable place, where dilapidation and the 
usury of centuries are revealed on every side — 
even on the marble columns worn by the constant 
friction of hands — ^this voice of gold that rises 



72 Egypt 

alone seems as if it were intoning the last lament 
over the death-pang of Old Islam and the end of 
time, the elegy, as it were, of the universal death 
of faith in the heart of man. 

''Science is one religion; prayer is another. Study is better 
than worship. Go; seek knowledge everywhere, if needs be, 
even into China." Verses from the Hadith. 

Amongst us Europeans it is commonly ac- 
cepted as a proven fact that Islam is merely a 
religion of obscurantism, bringing in its train the 
stagnation of nations, and hampering them in 
that march to the unknown which we call " prog- 
ress." But such an attitude shows not only an 
absolute ignorance of the teaching of the Prophet, 
but a blind forgetfulness of the evidence of his- 
tory. The Islam of the earlier centuries evolved 
and progressed with the nations, and the stimulus 
it gave to men in the reign of the ancient caliphs 
is beyond all question. To impute to it the 
present decadence of the Moslem world is al- 
together too puerile. The truth is that nations 
have their day; and to a period of glorious 
splendour succeeds a time of lassitude and 
slumber. It is a law of nature. And then one 
day some danger threatens them, stirs them from 
their torpor and they awake. 

This immobility of the countries of the Cres- 
cent was once dear to me. If the end is to pass 
through life with the minimum of suffering, dis- 



A Centre of Islam 73 

daining all vain striving, and to die entranced by 
radiant hopes, the Orientals are the only wise 
men. But now that greedy nations beset them on 
all sides their dreaming is no longer possible. 
They must awake, alas. 

They must awake ; and already the awakening 
is at hand. Here, in Egypt, where the need is 
felt to change so many things, it is proposed, too, 
to reform the old university of El-Azhar, one of 
the chief centres of Islam. One thinks of it with 
a kind of fear, knowing what danger there is in 
laying hands upon institutions which have lasted 
for a thousand years. Reform, however, has, in 
principle, been decided upon. New knowledge, 
brought from the West, is penetrating into the 
tabernacle of the Fatimites. Has not the Prophet 
said: "Go; seek knowledge far and wide, if 
needs be even into China"? What will come 
of it? Who can tell? But this, at least, is 
certain: that in the dazzling hours of noon, or 
in the golden hours of evening, when the crowd 
of these modernised students spreads itself over 
the vast courtyard, overlooked by its countless 
minarets, there will no longer be seen in their 
eyes the mystic light of to-day; and it will no 
longer be the old unshakable faith, nor the lofty 
and serene indifference, nor the profound peace, 
that these messengers will carry to the ends of 
the Mussulman earth. . . . 



IN THE TOMBS OF THE APIS 



CHAPTER VI 

IN THE TOMBS OF THE APIS 

The dwelling places of the Apis, in the grim 
darkness beneath the Memphite desert, are, as 
all the world knows, monster coffins of black 
granite ranged in catacombs, hot and stifling as 
eternal stoves. 

To reach them from the banks of the Nile we 
have first to traverse the low region which the in- 
undations of the ancient river, regularly repeated 
since the beginning of time, have rendered pro- 
pitious to the growth of plants and to the devel- 
opment of men; an hour or two's journey, this 
evening through forests of date-trees whose beau- 
tiful palms temper the light of the March sun, 
which is now halfveiled in clouds and already 
declining. In the distance herds are grazing in 
the cool shade. And we meet fellahs leading back 
from the field towards the village on the river- 
bank their little donkeys, laden with sheaves of 
corn. The air is mild and wholesome under the 
high tufts of these endless green plumes, which 
move in the warm wind almost without noise. We 
seem to be in some happy land, where the pastoral 
life should be easy, and even a little paradisaical. 
77 



78 Egypt 

But beyond, in front of us, quite a different 
world is gradually revealed. Its aspect assumes 
the importance of a menace from the unknown; 
it awes us like an apparition of chaos, of universal 
death. ... It is the desert, the conquering des- 
ert, in the midst of which inhabited Egypt, 
the green valleys of the Nile, trace merely a 
narrow ribbon. And here, more than elsewhere, 
the sight of this sovereign desert rising up before 
us is startling and thrilling, so high up it seems, 
and we so low in the Edenlike valley shaded by 
the palms. With its yellow hues, its livid mar- 
blings, and its sands which make it look some- 
how as if it lacked consistency, it rises on the 
whole horizon like a kind of soft wall or a great 
fearsome cloud — or rather, like a long cataclysmic 
wave, which does not move indeed, but which, if 
it did, would overwhelm and swallow everything. 
It is the Memphite desert — a place, that is to 
say, such as does not exist elsewhere on earth; a 
fabulous necropolis, in which men of earlier times, 
heaped up for some three thousand years the 
embalmed bodies of their dead, exaggerating, as 
time went on, the foolish grandeur of their tombs. 
Now, above the sand which looks like the front 
of some great tidal wave arrested in its progress, 
we see on all sides, and far into the distance, 
triangles of superhuman proportions which were 
once the tombs of mummies; pyramids, still 



In the Tombs of the Apis 79 

upright, all of them, on their sinister pedestal 

of sand. Some are comparatively near; others 

almost lost in the background of the solitudes 

— and perhaps more awesome in that they are 

merely outlined in grey, high up among the 

clouds. 

• •••••• 

The little carriages that have brought us to the 
necropolis of Memphis, through the interminable 
forest of palm-trees, had their wheels fitted with 
large pattens for their journey over the sand. 

Now, arrived at the foot of the fearsome 
region, we commence to climb a hill where all 
at once the trot of our horses ceases to be heard; 
the moving felting of the soil establishes a sudden 
silence around us, as indeed is always the case 
when we reach these sands. It seems as if it 
were a silence of respect which the desert itself 
imposes. 

The valley of life sinks and fades behind us, 
until at last it disappears, hidden by a line of 
sandhills — the first wave, as one might say, of 
this waterless sea — and we are now mounted into 
the kingdom of the dead, swept at this moment 
by a withering and almost icy wind, which from 
below one would not have expected. 

This desert of Memphis has not yet been pro- 
faned by hotels or motor roads, such as we have 
seen in the *' little desert '' of the Sphinx — whose 



8o Egypt 

three pyramids indeed we can discern at the ex- 
treme Hmit of the view, prolonging almost to in- 
finity for our eyes this domain of mummies. 
There is nobody to be seen, nor any indication 
of the present day, amongst these mournful un- 
dulations of yellow or pale grey sand, in which we 
seem lost as in the swell of an ocean. The sky 
is cloudy — such as you can scarcely imagine the 
sky of Egypt. And in this immense nothingness 
of sand and stones, which stands out now more 
clearly against the clouds on the horizon, there is 
nothing anywhere save the silhouettes of those 
eternal triangles: the pyramids, gigantic things 
which rise here and there at hazard, some half in 
ruin, others almost intact and preserving still 
their sharp point. To-day they are the only 
landmarks of this necropolis, which is nearly six 
miles in length, and was formerly covered by 
temples of a magnificence and a vastness un- 
imaginable to the minds of our day. Except for 
one which is quite near us (the fantastic grand- 
father of the others, that of King Zoser, who 
died nearly 5000 years ago), except for this one, 
which is made of six colossal superposed terraces, 
they are all built after that same conception of 
the Triangle, which is at once the most mysteri- 
ously simple figure of geometry, and the strong- 
est and most permanently stable form of archi- 
tecture. And now that there remains no trace of 



A DISTANT VIEW OF THE PYRAMIDS 



In the Tombs of the Apis 8i 

the frescoed portraits which used to adorn them, 
nor of their multicoloured coatings, now that 
they have taken on the same dead colour as the 
desert, they look like the huge bones of giant 
fossils, that have long outlasted their other con- 
temporaries on earth. Beneath the ground, how- 
ever, the case is different; there, still remain the 
bodies of men, and even of cats and birds, who 
with their own eyes saw these vast structures 
building, and who sleep intact, swathed in band- 
ages, in the darkness of their tunnels. We know, 
for we have penetrated there before, what things 
are hidden in the womb of this old desert, on 
which the yellow shroud of the sand grows 
thicker and thicker as the centuries pass. The 
whole deep rock has been perforated patiently 
to make hypogea and sepulchral chambers, great 
and small, and veritable palaces for the dead, 
adorned with innumerable painted figures. And 
though now, for some two thousand years, men 
have set themselves furiously to exhume the 
sarcophagi and the treasures that are buried here, 
the subterranean reserves are not yet exhausted. 
There still remain, no doubt, pleiads of undis- 
turbed sleepers, who will never be discovered. 

As we advance the wind grows stronger and 
colder beneath a sky that becomes increasingly 
cloudy, and the sand is flying on all sides. The 
sand is the undisputed sovereign of this necrop- 



82 Egyp^ 

olis; if it does not surge and roll like some 
enormous tidal wave, as it appears to do when 
seen from the green valley below, it nevertheless 
covers everything with an obstinate persistence 
which has continued since the beginning of time. 
Already at Memphis it has buried innumerable 
statues and colossi and temples of the Sphinx. 
It comes without a pause, from Libya, from the 
Great Sahara, which contain enough to powder 
the universe. It harmonises well with the tall 
skeletons of the pyramids, which form immut- 
able rocks on its always shifting extent; and if 
one thinks of it, it gives a more thrilling sense of 
anterior eternities even than all these Egyptian 
ruins, which, in comparison with it, are things of 
yesterday. The sand — the sand of the primi- 
tive seas — which represents a labour of erosion 
of a duration impossible to conceive, and bears 
witness to a continuity of destruction which, one 
might say, had no beginning. 

Here, in the midst of these solitudes, is a 
humble habitation, old and half buried in sand, 
at which we have to stop. It was once the 
house of the Egyptologist Mariette, and still 
shelters the director of the excavations, from 
whom we have to obtain permission to descend 
amongst the Apis. The whitewashed room in 
which he receives us is encumbered with the 
age-old debris which he is continually bringing 



In the Tombs of the Apis 83 

to light. The parting rays of the sun, which 
shines low down from between two clouds, enter 
through a window opening on to the surrounding 
desolation; and the light comes mournfully, yel- 
lowed by the sand and the evening. 

The master of the house, while his Bedouin 
servants are gone to open and light up for us 
the underground habitations of the Apis, shows 
us his latest astonishing find, made this morning 
in a hypogeum of one of the most ancient 
dynasties. It is there on a table, a group of 
little people of wood, of the size of the marion- 
ettes of our theatres. And since it was the 
custom to put in a tomb only those figures or 
objects which were most pleasing to him who 
dwelt in it, the man-mummy to whom this 
toy was offered in times anterior to all precise 
chronology must have been extremely partial to 
dancing-girls. In the middle of the group the 
man himself is represented, sitting in an arm- 
chair, and on his knee he holds his favourite 
dancing-girl. Other girls posture before him 
in a dance of the period; and on the ground sit 
musicians touching tambourines and strangely 
fashioned harps. All wear their hair in a long 
plait, which falls below their shoulders like the 
pigtail of the Chinese. It was the distinguishing 
mark of these kinds of courtesans. And these 
little people had kept their pose in the darkness 



8+ Egypt 

for some three thousand years before the com- 
mencement of the Christian era. ... In order to 
show it to us better the group is brought to the 
window, and the mournful hght which enters 
from across the infinite sohtudes of the desert 
colours them yellow and shows us in detail their 
little doll-like attitudes and their comical and 
frightened appearance — frightened perhaps to 
find themselves so old and issuing from so deep a 
night. They had not seen a setting of the sun, 
such as they now regard with their queer eyes, 
too long and too wide open, they had not seen 
such a thing for some five thousand years. . . . 

The habitation of the Apis, the lords of the 
necropolis, is little more than two hundred yards 
away. We are told that the place is now lighted 
up and that we may betake ourselves thither. 

The descent is by a narrow, rapidly sloping 
passage, dug in the soil, between banks of sand 
and broken stones. We are now completely 
sheltered from the bitter wind which blows 
across the desert, and from the dark doorway 
that opens before us comes a breath of air as 
from an oven. It is always dry and hot in the 
underground funeral places of Egypt, which 
make indeed admirable stoves for mummies. 
The threshold once crossed we are plunged first 
of all in darkness and, preceded by a lantern, 
make our way, by devious turnings, over large 



In the Tombs of the Apis 85 

flagstones, passing obelisks, fallen blocks of stone 
and other gigantic debris, in a heat that con- 
tinually increases. 

At last the principal artery of the hypogeum 
appears, a thoroughfare more than five hundred 
yards long, cut in the rock, where the Bedouins 
have prepared for us the customary feeble 
light. 

It is a place of fearful aspect. As soon as one 
enters one is seized by the sense of a mourn- 
fulness beyond words, by an oppression as of 
something too heavy, too crushing, almost super- 
human. The impotent little flames of the can- 
dles, placed in a row, in groups of fifty, on tri- 
pods of wood from one end of the route to the 
other, show on the right and left of the im- 
mense avenue rectangular sepulchral caverns, 
containing each a black coffin, but a coffin as 
if for a mastodon. And all these coffins, so 
sombre and so alike, are square shaped too, se- 
verely simple like so many boxes; but made out 
of a single block of rare granite that gleams 
like marble. They are entirely without orna- 
ment. It is necessary to look closely to dis- 
tinguish on the smooth walls the hieroglyphic 
inscriptions, the rows of little figures, little owls, 
little jackals, that tell in a lost language the his- 
tory of ancient peoples. Here is the signature 
of King Amasis; beyond, that of King Cam- 



86 Egypt 

byses. . . . Who were the Titans who, century 
after century, were able to hew these coffins (they 
are at least twelve feet long by ten feet high), 
and, having hewn them, to carry them under- 
ground (they weigh on an average between sixty 
and seventy tons), and finally to range them in 
rows here in these strange chambers, where they 
stand as if in ambuscade on either side of us as we 
pass? Each in its turn has contained quite com- 
fortably the mummy of a bull Apis, armoured in 
plates of gold. But in spite of their weight, in 
spite of their solidity which effectively defies 
destruction, they have been despoiled ^ — when is 
not precisely known, probably by the soldiers of 
the King of Persia. And this notwithstanding 
that merely to open them represents a labour 
of astonishing strength and patience. In some 
cases the thieves have succeeded, by the aid of 
levers, in moving a few inches the formidable 
lid; in others, by persevering with blows of 
pickaxes, they have pierced, in the thickness of 
the granite, a hole through which a man has been 
enabled to crawl like a rat, or a worm, and 

^ One, however, remains intact in its walled cavern, and 
thus preserves for us the only Apis which has come down to 
our days. And one recalls the emotion of Mariette, when, on 
entering it, he saw on the sandy ground the imprint of the 
naked feet of the last Egyptian who left it thirty-seven cen- 
turies before. 



In the Tombs of the Apis 87 

then, groping his way, to plunder the sacred 
mummy. 

What strikes us most of all in the colossal 
hypogeum is the meeting there, in the middle 
of the stairway by which we leave, with yet 
another black coffin, which lies across our path 
as if to bar it. It is as monstrous and as simple 
as the others, its seniors, which many centuries 
before, as the deified bulls died, had commenced 
to line the great straight thoroughfare. But this 
one has never reached its place and never held 
its mummy. It was the last. Even while men 
were slowly rolling it, with tense muscles and 
panting cries, towards what might well have 
seemed its eternal chamber, other gods were 
born, and the cult of the Apis had come to an 
end — suddenly, then and there ! Such a fate may 
happen indeed to each and all of the religions 
and institutions of men, even to those most 
deeply rooted in their hearts and their ancestral 
past. . . . That perhaps is the most disturbing 
of all our positive notions: to know that there 
will be a last of all things, not only a last temple, 
and a last priest, but a last birth of a human 
child, a last sunrise, a last day. . . . 
• ••...• 

In these hot catacombs we had forgotten the 
cold wind that blew outside, and the physiog- 
nomy of the Memphite desert, the aspects of 



88 Egypt 

horror that were awaiting us above had vanished 
from our mind. Sinister as it is under a blue 
sky, this desert becomes absolutely intolerable to 
look upon if by chance the sky is cloudy when 
the daylight fails. 

On our return to it, from the subterranean 
darkness, everything in its dead immensity has 
begun to take on the blue tint of the night. On 
the top of the sandhills, of which the yellow 
colour has greatly paled since we went below, 
the wind amuses itself by raising little vortices of 
sand that imitate the spray of an angry sea. On 
all sides dark clouds stretch themselves as at the 
moment of our descent. The horizon detaches 
itself more and more clearly from them, and, 
farther towards the east, it actually seems to be 
tilted up; one of the highest of the waves of 
this waterless sea, a mountain of sand whose 
soft contours are deceptive in the distance, 
makes it look as if it sloped towards us, so as 
almost to produce a sensation of vertigo. The 
sun itself has deigned to remain on the scene a 
few seconds longer, held beyond its time by the 
effect of mirage; but it is so changed behind its 
thick veils that we would prefer that it should 
not be there. Of the colour of dying embers, it 
seems too near and too large; it has ceased to 
give any light, and is become a mere rose- 
coloured globe, that is losing its shape and 



I 



In the Tombs of the Apis 89 

becoming oval. No longer in the free heavens, 
but stranded there on the extreme edge of the 
desert, it watches the scene like a large dull eye, 
about to close itself in death. And the mysteri- 
ous superhuman triangles, they too, of course, 
are there, waiting for us on our return from un- 
derground, some near, some far, posted in their 
eternal places; but surely they have grown 
larger in the twilight, which grows gradually 
more blue. . . . 

Such a night, in such a place, it seems the 
last night. 



THE OUTSKIRTS 
OF CAIRO 



CHAPTER VII 

THE OUTSKIRTS OF CAIRO 

Night. A long straight road, the artery of 
some capital, through which our carriage drives 
at a fast trot, making a deafening clatter on the 
pavement. Electric light everywhere. The shops 
are closing ; it must needs be late. 

The road is Levantine in its general character : 
and we should have no clear notion of the place 
did we not see in our rapid, noisy passage 
signs that recall us to the land of the Arabs. 
People pass dressed in the long robe and tar- 
boosh of the East; and some of the houses, 
above the European shops, are ornamented 
with mushrabiyas. But this blinding electricity 
strikes a false note. In our hearts are we quite 
sure we are in the East? 

The road ends, opening on to darkness. 
Suddenly, without any warning, it abuts upon 
a void in which the eyes see nothing, and we 
roll over a yielding, felted soil, where all noise 
abruptly ceases — it is the desert! . . . Not a 
vague, nondescript stretch of country such as 
in the outskirts of our towns, not one of the 
sohtudes of Europe, but the threshold of the 
93 



94- Egypt 

vast desolations of Arabia. The desert; and, 
even if we had not known that it was awaiting 
us, we should have recognised it by its in- 
describable quality of harshness and uniqueness 
which, in spite of the darkness, cannot be 
mistaken. 

But the night after all is not so black. It 
only seemed so, at the first moment, by con- 
trast with the glaring illumination of the street. 
In reality it is transparent and blue. A half- 
moon, high up in the heavens, and veiled by 
a diaphanous mist, shines gently, and as it is 
an Egyptian moon, more subtle than ours, it 
leaves to things a little of their colour. We can 
see now, as well as feel, this desert, which has 
opened and imposed its silence upon us. Before 
us is the paleness of its sands and the reddish- 
brown of its dead rocks. Verily, in no country 
but Egypt are there such rapid surprises: to 
issue from a street flanked by shops and stalls 
and, without transition, to find this! . . . 

Our horses have, inevitably, to slacken speed 
as the wheels of our carriage sink into the 
sand. Around us still are some stray ramblers, 
who presently assume the air of ghosts, with 
their long black or white draperies, and noiseless 
tread. And then, not a soul; nothing but the 
sand and the moon. 

But now almost at once, after the short inter- 



The Outskirts of Cairo 95 

vening nothingness, we find ourselves in a 
new town; streets with Httle low houses, little 
cross-roads, little squares, all of them white, on 
whitened sands, beneath a white moon. . . . 
But there is no electricity in this town, no 
lights, and nobody is stirring ; doors and windows 
are shut: no movement of any kind, and the 
silence, at first, is like that of the surrounding 
desert. It is a town in which the half-light of 
the moon, amongst so much vague whiteness, 
is diffused in such a way that it seems to come 
from all sides at once and things cast no shadows 
which might give them definiteness; a town 
where the soil is so yielding that our progress is 
weakened and retarded, as in dreams. It seems 
unreal: and, in penetrating farther into it, a 
sense of fear comes over you that can neither 
be dismissed nor defined. 

For assuredly this is no ordinary town. . . . 
And yet the houses, with their windows barred 
like those of a harem, are in no way singular — 
except that they are shut and silent. It is all 
this whiteness, perhaps, which freezes us. And 
then, too, the silence is not, in fact, like that of 
the desert, which did at least seem natural, 
inasmuch as there was nothing there; here, on 
the contrary, there is a sense of innumerable 
presences, which shrink away as you pass but 
nevertheless continue to watch attentively. . . . 



96 Egypt 

We pass mosques in total darkness and they 
too are silent and white, with a slight bluish 
tint cast on them by the moon. And sometimes, 
between the houses, there are little enclosed 
spaces, like narrow gardens, but which can have 
no possible verdure. And in these gardens 
numbers of little obelisks rise from the sand — 
white obelisks, it is needless to say, for to-night 
we are in the kingdom of absolute whiteness. 
What can they be, these strange little gardens? 
. . . And the sand, meanwhile, which covers 
the streets with its thick coatings, continues to 
deaden the sound of our progress, out of com- 
pliment no doubt to all these watchful things 
that are so silent around us. 

At the crossings and in the little squares the 
obelisks become more numerous, erected always 
at either end of a slab of stone that is about the 
length of a man. Their little motionless groups, 
posted as if on the watch, seem so little real in 
their vague whiteness that we feel tempted to 
verify them by touching, and, verily, we should 
not be astonished if our hand passed through 
them as through a ghost. Farther on there is a 
wide expanse without any houses at all, where 
these ubiquitous little obelisks abound in the 
sand like ears of corn in a field. There is now 
no further room for illusion. We are in a cem- 
etery, and have been passing in the midst of 



The Outskirts of Cairo 97 

houses of the dead, and mosques of the dead, in 
a town of the dead. 

Once emerged from this cemetery, which in 
the end at least disclosed itself in its true char- 
acter, we are involved again in the continuation 
of the mysterious town, which takes us back 
into its network. Little houses follow one an- 
other as before, only now the little gardens are 
replaced by little burial enclosures. And every- 
thing grows more and more indistinct, in the 
gentle light, which gradually grows less. It is 
as if someone were putting frosted globes over 
the moon, so that soon, but for the transparency 
of this air of Egypt and the prevailing whiteness 
of things, there would be no light at all. Once 
at a window the light of a lamp appears; it is 
the lantern of gravediggers. Anon we hear the 
voices of men chanting a prayer; and the prayer 
is a prayer for the dead. 

These tenantless houses were never built for 
dwellings. They are simply places where men 
assemble on certain anniversaries, to pray for the 
dead. Every Moslem family of any note has its 
little temple of this kind, near to the family 
graves. And there are so many of them that 
now the place is become a town — and a town in 
the desert — that is to say, in a place useless for 
any other purpose ; a secure place indeed, for we 
may be sure that the ground occupied by these 



98 Egypt 

poor tombs runs no risk of being coveted — not 
even in the irreverent times of the future. No, 
it is on the other side of Cairo — on the other 
bank of the Nile, amongst the verdure of the 
palm-trees, that we must look for the suburb in 
course of transformation, with its villas of the 
invading foreigner, and the myriad electric lights 
along its motor roads. On this side there is no 
such fear; the peace and desuetude are eternal; 
and the winding sheet of the Arabian sands is 
ready always for its burial office. 

At the end of this town of the dead, the desert 
again opens before us its mournful whitened 
expanse. On such a night as this, when the 
wind blows cold and the misty moon shows like 
a sad opal, it looks like a steppe under snow. 

But it is a desert planted with ruins, with the 
ghosts of mosques; a whole colony of high 
tumbling domes are scattered here at hazard 
on the shifting extent of the sands. And what 
strange old-fashioned domes they are! The 
archaism of their silhouettes strikes us from the 
first, as much as their isolation in such a place. 
They look like bells, or gigantic dervish hats 
placed on pedestals, and those farthest away 
give the impression of squat, large-headed figures 
posted there as sentinels, watching the vague 
horizon of Arabia beyond. 

They are the proud tombs of the fourteenth 



The Outskirts of Cairo 99 

and fifteenth centuries where the JVIameluke 
Sultans, who oppressed Egypt for nearly three 
hundred years, sleep now in complete abandon- 
ment. Nowadays, it is true, some visits are 
beginning to be paid to them — on winter nights 
when the moon is full and they throw on the 
sands their great clear-cut shadows. At such 
times the light is considered favourable, and 
they rank among the curiosities exploited by the 
agencies. Numbers of tourists (who persist in 
calling them the tombs of the caliphs) betake 
themselves thither of an evening — a noisy caravan 
mounted on little donkeys. But to-night the 
moon is too pale and uncertain, and we shall no 
doubt be alone in troubling them in their ghostly 
communion. 

To-night indeed the light is quite unusual. 
As just now in the town of the dead, it is diffused 
on all sides and gives even to the most massive 
objects the transparent semblance of unreality. 
But nevertheless it shows their detail and leaves 
them something of their daylight colouring, so 
that all these funeral domes, raised on the ruins 
of the mosques, which serve them as pedestals, 
have preserved their reddish or brown colours, 
although the sand which separates them, and 
makes between the tombs of the different sultans 
little dead solitudes, remains pale and wan. 

And meanwhile our carriage, proceeding al- 



loo Egypt 

ways without noise, traces on this same sand httle 
furrows which the wind will have effaced by 
to-morrow. There are no roads of any kind; 
they would indeed be as useless as they are 
impossible to make. You may pass here where 
you list, and fancy yourself far away from any 
place inhabited by living beings. The great town, 
which we know to be so close, appears from time 
to time, thanks to the undulations of the ground, 
as a mere phosphorescence, a reflection of its 
myriad electric lights. We are indeed in the 
desert of the dead, in the sole company of the 
moon, which, by the fantasy of this wonderful 
Egyptian sky, is to-night a moon of grey pearl, 
one might almost say a moon of mother-of-pearl. 

Each of these funeral mosques is a thing of 
splendour, if one examines it closely in its soli- 
tude. Those strange upraised domes, which from 
a distance look like the head-dresses of dervishes 
or magi, are embroidered with arabesques, and 
the walls are crowned with denticulated trefoils 
of exquisite fashioning. 

But nobody venerates these tombs of the 
Mameluke oppressors, or keeps them in repair; 
and within them there are no more chants, no 
prayers to Allah. Night after night they pass in 
an infinity of silence. Piety contents itself with 
not destroying them; leaving them there at the 
mercy of time and the sun and the wind which 



The Outskirts of Cairo loi 

withers and crumbles them. And all around are 
the signs of ruin. Tottering cupolas show us 
irreparable cracks; the halves of broken arches 
are outlined to-night in shadow against the 
mother-of-pearl light of the sky, and debris of 
sculptured stones are strewn about. But never- 
theless these tombs, that are well-nigh accursed, 
still stir in us a vague sense of alarm — particu- 
larly those in the distance, which rise up like sil- 
houettes of misshapen giants in enormous hats — 
dark on the white sheet of sand — and stand there 
in groups, or scattered in confusion, at the en- 
trance to the vast empty regions beyond. 
• •.•••• 

We had chosen a time when the light was 
doubtful in order that we might avoid the 
tourists, but as we approach the funeral dwell- 
ing of Sultan Barkuk, the assassin, we see, issu- 
ing from it, a whole band, some twenty in a line, 
who emerge from the darkness of the abandoned 
walls, each trotting on his little donkey and each 
followed by the inevitable Bedouin driver, who 
taps with his stick upon the rump of the beast. 
They are returning to Cairo, their visit ended, 
and exchange in a loud voice, from one ass to 
another, more or less inept impressions in various 
European languages. . . . And look! there is 
even amongst them the almost proverbial belated 
dame who, for private reasons of her own, follows 



I02 Egypt 

at a respectable distance behind. She is a little 
mature perhaps, so far as can be judged in the 
moonlight, but nevertheless still sympathetic to 
her driver, who, with both hands, supports her 
from behind on her saddle, with a touching 
solicitude that is peculiar to the country. Ah! 
these little donkeys of Egypt, so observant, so 
philosophical and sly, why cannot they write 
their memoirs! What a number of droll things 
they must have seen at night in the outskirts of 
Cairo ! 

This good lady evidently belongs to that ex- 
tensive category of hardy explorers who, despite 
their high respectability at home, do not hesitate, 
once they are landed on the banks of the Nile, 
to supplement their treatment by the sun and 
the dry winds with a little of the " Bedouin 



cure." 



ARCHAIC CHRISTIANITY 



CHAPTER VIII 

111 

ARCHAIC CHRISTIANITY 

Dimly lighted by the flames of a few poor 
slender tapers which flicker against the walls in 
stone niches, a dense crowd of human figures 
veiled in black, in a place overpowering and suf- 
focating — -underground, no doubt — which is filled 
with the perfume of the incense of Arabia : and a 
noise of almost wicked movement, which stirs us 
to alarm and even horror: bleatings of new-born 
babies, cries of distress of tiny mites whose 
voices are drowned, as if on purpose, by a 
clinking of cymbals. . . . 

What can it be? Why have they descended 
into this dark hole, these little ones, who howl 
in the midst of the smoke, held by these phantoms 
in mourning? Had we entered it unawares we 
might have thought it a den of wicked sorcery, 
an underground cavern for the black mass. 

But no. It is the crypt of the basilica of 
St Sergius during the Coptic mass of Easter 
morning. And when, after the first surprise, 
we examine these phantoms, we find that, for 
the most part, they are young mothers, with the 
refined and gentle faces of Madonnas, who hold 

105 



io6 Egypt 

the plaintive little ones beneath their black veils 
and seek to comfort them. And the sorcerer, 
who plays the cymbals, is a kind old priest, or 
sacristan, who smiles paternally. If he makes 
all this noise, in a rhythm which in itself is full 
of joy, it is to mark the gladness of Easter morn, 
to celebrate the resurrection of Christ — and a 
little, too, no doubt, to distract the little ones, 
some of whom are woefully put out. But their 
manmias do not prolong the proof — a mere 
momentary visit to this venerable place, which 
is to bring them happiness, and they carry their 
babes away: and others are led in by the dark, 
narrow staircase, so low that one cannot stand 
upright in it. And thus the crypt is not 
emptied. And meanwhile mass is being said 
in the Church overhead. 

But what a number of people, of black veils, 
are in this hovel, where the air can scarcely be 
breathed, and where the barbarous music, min- 
gled with wailings and cries, deafens you! And 
what an air of antiquity marks all things here! 
The defaced walls, the low roof that one can 
easily touch, the granite pillars which sustain the 
shapeless arches, are all blackened by the smoke 
of the wax candles, and scarred and worn by the 
friction of human hands. 

At the end of the crypt there is a very sacred 
recess round which a crowd presses: a coarse 



Archaic Christianity 107 

niche, a little larger than those cut in the wall 
to receive the tapers, a niche which covers the 
ancient stone on which, according to tradition, 
the Virgin Mary rested, with the child Jesus, in 
the course of the flight into Egypt. This holy 
stone is sadly worn to-day and polished smooth 
by the touch of many pious hands, and the 
Byzantine cross which once was carved on it is 
almost effaced. 

But even if the Virgin had never rested there, 
the humble crypt of St Sergius would remain 
no less one of the oldest Christian sanctuaries in 
the world. And the Copts who still assemble 
there with veneration have preceded by many 
years the greater part of our Western nations in 
the religion of the Bible. 

Although the history of Egypt envelops itself 
in a sort of night at the moment of the appear- 
ance of Christianity, we know that the growth 
of the new faith there was as rapid and im- 
petuous as the germination of plants under the 
overflow of the Nile. The old Pharaonic cults, 
amalgamated at that time with those of Greece, 
were so obscured under a mass of rites and for- 
mulae, that they had ceased to have any mean- 
ing. And nevertheless here, as in imperial Rome, 
there brooded the ferment of a passionate mysti- 
cism. Moreover, this Egyptian people, more 
than any other, was haunted by the terror of 



io8 Egypt 

death, as is proved by the folly of its embalm- 
ments. With what avidity therefore must it 
have received the Word of fraternal love and 
immediate resurrection. 

In any case Christianity was so firmly im- 
planted in this Egypt that centuries of persecu- 
tion did not succeed in destroying it. As one 
goes up the Nile, many little human settlements 
are to be seen, little groups of houses of dried 
mud, where the whitened dome of the modest 
house of prayer is surmounted by a cross and 
not a crescent. They are the villages of those 
Copts, those Egyptians, who have preserved the 
Christian faith from father to son since the 
nebulous times of the first martyrs. 
• •••••* 

The simple Church of St Sergius is a relic 
hidden away and almost buried in the midst of a 
labyrinth of ruins. Without a guide it is almost 
impossible to find your way thither. The quarter 
in which it is situated is enclosed within the walls 
of what was once a Roman fortress, and this 
fortress in its turn is surrounded by the tranquil 
ruins of " Old Cairo " — which is to the Cairo 
of the Mamelukes and the Khedives, in a small 
degree, what Versailles is to Paris. 

On this Easter morning, having set out from 
the Cairo of to-day to be present at this mass, 
we have first to traverse a suburb in course of 



Archaic Christianity log 

transformation, upon whose ancient soil will 
shortly appear numbers of those modern horrors, 
in mud and metal — factories or large hotels — 
which multiply in this poor land with a stupefy- 
ing rapidity. Then comes a mile or so of un- 
cultivated ground, mixed with stretches of sand, 
and already a little desertlike. And then the 
walls of Old Cairo ; after which begins the peace 
of the deserted houses, of little gardens and or- 
chards among the ruins. The wind and the dust 
beset us the whole way, the almost eternal wind 
and the eternal dust of this land, by which, since 
the beginning of the ages, so many human eyes 
have been burnt beyond recovery. They keep 
us now in blinding whirlwinds, which swarm 
with flies. The " season " indeed is already over, 
and the foreign invaders have fled until next 
autumn. Egypt is now more Egyptian, beneath 
a more burning sky. The sun of this Easter 
Sunday is as hot as ours of July, and the ground 
seems as if it would perish of drought. But it 
is always thus in the springtime of this rainless 
country; the trees, which have kept their leaves 
throughout the winter, shed them in April as ours 
do in November. There is no shade anywhere 
and everything suffers. Everything grows yel- 
low on the yellow sands. But there is no cause 
for uneasiness: the inundation is at hand, which 
has never failed since the commencement of our 



no Egypt 

geological period. In another few weeks the 
prodigious river will spread along its banks, just 
as in the times of the God Amen, a precocious 
and impetuous life. And meanwhile the orange- 
trees, the jasmine and the honeysuckle, which 
men have taken care to water with water from the 
Nile, are full of riotous bloom. As we pass the 
gardens of Old Cairo, which alternate with the 
tumbling houses, this continual cloud of white 
dust that envelops us comes suddenly laden with 
their sweet fragrance ; so that, despite the drought 
and the bareness of the trees, the scents of a sud- 
den and feverish springtime are already in the air. 
When we arrive at the walls of what used to 
be the Roman citadel we have to descend from 
our carriage, and passing through a low doorway 
penetrate on foot into the labyrinth of a Coptic 
quarter which is dying of dust and old age. 
Deserted houses that have become the refuges 
of outcasts; mushrabiyas, worm-eaten and de- 
cayed; little mousetrap alleys that lead us under 
arches of the Middle Ages, and sometimes 
close over our heads by reason of the fantastic 
bending of the ruins. Even by such a route as 
this are we conducted to a famous basilica! 
Were it not for these groups of Copts, dressed 
in their Sunday garb, who make their way like 
us through the ruins to the Easter mass, we 
should think that v/e had lost our way. 



Archaic Christianity in 

And how pretty they look, these women 
draped Hke phantoms in their black silks. Their 
long veils do not completely hide them, as do 
those of the Moslems. They are simply placed 
over their hair and leave uncovered the delicate 
features, the golden necklet and the half -bared 
arms that carry on their wrists thick twisted 
bracelets of virgin gold. Pure Egyptians as 
they are, they have preserved the same delicate 
profile, the same elongated eyes, as mark the old 
goddesses carved in bas-relief on the Pharaonic 
walls. But some, alas, amongst the young ones 
have discarded their traditional costume, and are 
arrayed a la franque, in gowns and hats. And 
such gowns, such hats, such flowers! The very 
peasants of our meanest villages would disdain 
them. Oh! why cannot someone tell these poor 
little women, who have it in their power to be so 
adorable, that the beautiful folds of their black 
veils give to them an exquisite and characteristic 
distinction, while this poor tinsel, which recalls 
the mid-Lent carnivals, makes of them objects 
that excite our pity! 

In one of the walls which now surround us 
there is a low and shrinking doorway. Can this 
be the entrance to the basilica? The idea seems 
absurd. And yet some of the pretty creatures 
in the black veils and bracelets of gold, who were 
in front of us, have disappeared through it, and 



112 Egypt 

already the perfume of the censers is wafted to- 
wards us. A kind of corridor, astonishingly poor 
and old, twists itself suspiciously, and then issues 
into a narrow court, more than a thousand years 
old, where offertory boxes, fixed on Oriental 
brackets, invite our alms. The odour of the in- 
cense becomes more pronounced, and at last a 
door, hidden in shadow at the end of this retreat, 
gives access to the venerable church itself. 

The church! It is a mixture of Byzantine 
basilica, mosque and desert hut. Entering there, 
it is as if we were introduced suddenly to the 
naive infancy of Christianity, as if we surprised 
it, as it were, in its cradle — which was indeed 
Oriental. The triple nave is full of little chil- 
dren (here also, that is what strikes us first), 
of little mites who cry or else laugh and play; 
and there are mothers suckling their new-born 
babes — and all the time the invisible mass is 
being celebrated beyond, behind the iconostasis. 
On the ground, on mats, whole families are 
seated in circle, as if they were in their homes. 
A thick deposit of white chalk on the defaced, 
shrunken walls bears witness to great age. And 
over all this is a strange old ceiling of cedarwood, 
traversed by large barbaric beams. 

In the nave, supported by columns of marble, 
brought in days gone by from Pagan temples, 
there are, as in all these old Coptic churches. 



Archaic Christianity 113 

high transverse wooden partitions, elaborately 
wTOUght in the Arab fashion, which divide it 
into three sections: the first, into which one 
comes on entering the church, is allotted to the 
women, the second is for the baptistery, and 
the third, at the end adjoining the iconostasis, 
is reserved for the men. 

These women who are gathered this morning 
in their apportioned space — so much at home 
there with their suckling little ones — wear, al- 
most all of them, the long black silk veils of 
former days. In their harmonious and endlessly 
restless groups, the gowns a la franque and the 
poor hats of carnival are still the exception. 
The congregation, as a whole, preserves almost 
intact its naive, old-time favour. 

And there is movement too, beyond, in the 
compartment of the men, which is bounded at 
the farther end by the iconostasis — a thousand- 
year-old wall decorated with inlaid cedarwood 
and ivory of precious antique workmanship, and 
adorned with strange old icons, blackened by 
time. It is behind this wall — pierced by several 
doorways — that mass is now being said. From 
this last sanctuary shut off thus from the people 
comes the vague sound of singing; from time to 
time a priest raises a faded silk curtain and from 
the threshold makes the sign of blessing. His 
vestments are of gold, and he wears a golden 



1 14 Egypt 

crown, but the humble faithful speak to him 
freely, and even touch his gorgeous garments, 
that might be those of one of the Wise Kings. 
He smiles, and letting fall the curtain, which 
covers the entrance to the tabernacle, disappears 
again into his innocent mystery. 

Even the least things here tell of decay. The 
flagstones, trodden by the feet of numberless 
dead generations, are become uneven through the 
settling of the soil. Everything is askew, bent, 
dusty and worn-out. The daylight comes from 
above, through narrow barred windows. There 
is a lack of air, so that one almost stifles. But 
though the sun does not enter, a certain in- 
definable reflection from the whitened walls re- 
minds us that outside there is a flaming, resplen- 
dent Eastern spring. 

In this, the old grandfather, as it were, of 
churches, filled now with a cloud of odorous 
smoke, what one hears, more even than the 
chanting of the mass, is the ceaseless movement, 
the pious agitation of the faithful; and more 
even than that, the startling noise that rises 
from the holy crypt below — the sharp clashing 
of cymbals and those multitudinous little wail- 
ings, that sound like the mewings of kittens. 

But let me not harbour thoughts of irony! 
Surely not. If, in our Western lands, certain 
ceremonies seem to me anti- Christian — as, for 



Archaic Christianity 115 

example, one of those spectacular high masses 
in the over-pompous Cathedral of Cologne, where 
halberdiers overawe the crowd — here, on the con- 
trary, the simplicity of this primitive cult is 
touching and respectable in the extreme. These 
Copts who instal themselves in their church as 
round their firesides, who make their home there 
and encumber the place with their fretful little 
ones, have, in their own way, well understood 
the words of Him who said: " Suffer the little 
children to come unto Me, and do not forbid 
them, for of such is the kingdom of God." 



THE RACE OF BRONZE 



CHAPTER IX 

THE RACE OF BRONZE 

A MONOTONOUS chant on three notes, which must 
date from the first Pharaohs, may still be heard 
in our days on the banks of the Xile, from the 
Delta as far as Nubia. At different places along 
the river, half -nude men, with torsos of bronze 
and voices all alike, intone it in the morning when 
they commence their endless labours and con- 
tinue it throughout the day, until the evening 
brings repose. 

Whoever has journeyed in a dahabiya up the 
old river will remember this song of the water- 
drawers, with its accompaniment, in slow cadence, 
of creakings of wet wood. 

It is the song of the " shaduf," and the 
" shaduf " is a primitive rigging, which has re- 
mained unchanged since times beyond all reckon- 
ing. It is composed of a long antenna, like the 
yard of a tartan, which is supported in see-saw 
fashion on an upright beam, and carries at its 
extremity a wooden bucket. A man, with 
movements of singular beauty, works it while 
he sings, lowers the antenna, draws the water 
from the river, and raises the filled bucket, which 
119 



I20 Egypt 

another man catches in its ascent and empties 
into a basin made out of the mud of the river 
bank. When the river is low there are three 
such basins, placed one above the other, as if 
they were stages by which the precious water 
mounts to the fields of corn and lucerne. And 
then three " shadufs," one above the other, creak 
together, lowering and raising their great scara- 
bgeus' horns to the rhythm of the same song. 

All along the banks of the Nile this movement 
of the antennae of the shadufs is to be seen. It 
had its beginning in the earliest ages and is still 
the characteristic manifestation of human life 
along the river banks. It ceases only in the 
summer, when the river, swollen by the rains of 
equatorial Africa, overflows this land of Egypt, 
which it itself has made in the midst of the 
Saharan sands. But in the winter, which is here 
a time of luminous drought and changeless blue 
skies, it is in full swing. Then every day, from 
dawn until the evening prayer, the men are busy 
at their water-drawing, transformed for the time 
into tireless machines, with muscles that work 
like metal bands. The action never changes, 
any more than the song, and often their thoughts 
must wander from their automatic toil, and lose 
themselves in some dream, akin to that of their 
ancestors who were yoked to the same rigging 
four or five thousand years ago. Their torsos, 



The Race of Bronze 121 

deluged at each rising of the overflowing bucket, 
stream constantly with cold water; and some- 
times the wind is icy, even while the sun burns; 
but these perpetual workers are, as we have said, 
of bronze, and their hardened bodies take no 
harm. 

These men are the fellahs, the peasants of the 
valley of the Nile — pure Egyptians, whose type 
has not changed in the course of centuries. In 
the oldest of the bas-reliefs of Thebes or Mem- 
phis you may see many such, with the same noble 
profile and thickish lips, the same elongated eyes 
shadowed by heavy eyelids, the same slender 
figure, surmounted by broad shoulders. 

The women who from time to time descend 
to the river, to draw water also, but in their 
case in the vases of potters' clay which they 
carry — this fetching and carrying of the life- 
giving water is the one primordial occupation in 
this Egypt, which has no rain, nor any living 
spring, and subsists only by its river — these 
women walk and posture with an inimitable 
grace, draped in black veils, which even the 
poorest allow to trail behind them, like the train 
of a court dress. In this bright land, with its 
rose-coloured distances, it is strange to see them, 
all so sombrely clothed, spots of mourning, as it 
were, in the gay fields and the flaring desert. 
Machine-like creatures, all untaught, they yet 



122 Egypt 

possess by instinct, as did once the daughters of 
Hellas, a sense of nobility in attitude and car- 
riage. None of the women of Europe could wear 
these coarse black stuffs with such a majestic 
harmony, and none surely could so raise their 
bare arms to place on their heads the heavy jars 
filled with Nile water, and then, departing, carry 
themselves so proudly, so upright and resilient 
under their burden. 

The muslin tunics which they wear are in- 
variably black like the veils, set off perhaps with 
some red embroidery or silver spangles. They 
are unfastened across the chest, and, by a narrow 
opening which descends to the girdle, disclose the 
amber-coloured flesh, the median swell of bosoms 
of pale bronze, which, during their ephemeral 
youth at least, are of a perfect contour. The 
faces, it is true, when they are not hidden from 
you by a fold of the veil, are generally disap- 
pointing. The rude labours, the early maternity 
and lactations, soon age and wither them. But 
if by chance you see a young woman she is 
usually an apparition of beauty, at once vigorous 
and slender. 

As for the fellah babies, who abound in great 
numbers and follow, half naked, their mammas 
or their big sisters, they would for the most part 
be adorable little creatures, were it not for the 
dirtiness which in this country is a thing almost 



The Race of Bronze 123 

prescribed by tradition. Round their eyelids 
and their moist hps are glued little clusters of 
Egyptian flies, which are considered here to be 
beneficial to the children, and the latter have 
no thought of driving them away, so resigned 
are they become, by force of heredity, to what- 
ever annoyance they thereby suffer. Another 
example indeed of the passivity which their 
fathers show when brought face to face with the 
invading foreigners! 

Passivity and meek endurance seem to be 
the characteristics of this inoffensive people, so 
graceful in their rags, so mysterious in their 
age-old inmiobility, and so ready to accept with 
an equal indifference whatever yoke may come. 
Poor, beautiful people, with muscles that never 
grow tired! Whose men in olden times moved 
the great stones of the temples, and knew no 
burden that was too heavy; whose women, with 
their slender, pale-tawny arms and delicate small 
hands, surpass by far in strength the burliest 
of our peasants ! Poor beautiful race of bronze ! 
No doubt it was too precocious and put forth 
too soon its astonishing flower — in times when 
the other peoples of the earth were still vegetat- 
ing in obscurity; no doubt its present resigna- 
tion comes from lassitude, after so many centuries 
of effort and expansive power. Once it mono- 
polised the glory of the world, and here it is 



124 Egypt 

now — for some two thousand years — fallen into 
a kind of tired sleep, which has left it an easy 
prey alike to the conquerors of yesterday and 
to the exploiters of to-day. 

Another trait which, side by side with their 
patience, prevails amongst these true-blooded 
Egyptians of the countryside is their attachment 
to the soil, to the soil which nourishes them, and 
in which later on they will sleep. To possess 
land, to forestall at any price the smallest por- 
tion of it, to reclaim patches of it from the 
shifting desert, that is the sole aim, or almost 
so, which the fellahs pursue in this world: to 
possess a field, however small it may be — a field, 
moreover, which they till with the oldest plough 
invented by man, the exact design of which may 
be seen carved on the walls of the tombs at 
Memphis. 

And this same people, which was the first of 
any to conceive magnificence, whose gods and 
kings were formerly surrounded with an over- 
powering splendour, contrives to live to-day, 
pell-mell with its sheep and goats, in humble, 
low-roofed cabins made out of sunbaked mud! 
The Egyptian villages are all of the neutral 
colour of the soil; a little white chalk brightens, 
perhaps, the minaret or cupola of the mosque; 
but except for that little refuge, whither folk 
come to pray each evening — for no one here 



The Race of Bronze 125 

would retire for the night without having first 
prostrated himself before the majesty of Allah 
— everything is of a mournful grey. Even the 
costumes of the people are dull-coloured and 
wretched-looking. It is an East grown poor 
and old, although the sky remains as wonderful 
as ever. 

But all this past grandeur has left its imprint 
on the fellahs. They have a refinement of ap- 
pearance and manner, all unknown amongst 
the majority of the good people of our villages. 
And those amongst them who by good fortune 
become prosperous have forthwith a kind of dis- 
tinction, and seem to know, as if by birth, how 
to dispense the gracious hospitality of an aris- 
tocrat. The hospitality of even the humblest 
preserves something of courtesy and ease, which 
tells of breed. I remember those clear evenings 
when, after the peaceful navigation of the day, 
I used to stop and draw up my dahabiya to 
the bank of the river. (I speak now of out-of- 
the-way places — free as yet from the canker 
of the tourist element — such as I habitually 
chose.) It was in the twilight at the hour when 
the stars began to shine out from the golden 
green sky. As soon as I put foot upon the 
shore, and my arrival was signalled by the bark- 
ing of the watchdogs, the chief of the nearest 
hamlet always came to meet me. A dignified 



126 Egypt 

man, in a long robe of striped silk or modest 
blue cotton, he accosted me with formulae of 
welcome quite in the grand manner; insisted on 
my following him to his house of dried mud ; and 
there, escorting me, after the exchange of further 
compliments, to the place of honour on the poor 
divan of his lodging, forced me to accept the 
traditional cup of Arab coffee. 
• •••••• 

To wake these fellahs from their strange sleep, 
to open their eyes at last, and to transform them 
by a modern education — that is the task which 
nowadays a select band of Egyptian patriots is 
desirous of attempting. Not long ago, such an 
endeavour would have seemed to me a crime; 
for these stubborn peasants were living under 
conditions of the least suffering, rich in faith 
and poor in desire. But to-day they are suffering 
from an invasion more undermining, more dan- 
gerous than that of the conquerors who killed 
by sword and fire. The Occidentals are there, 
everywhere, amongst them, profiting by their 
meek passivity to turn them into slaves for their 
business and their pleasure. The work of degra- 
dation of these simpletons is so easy: men bring 
them new desires, new greeds, new needs, — and 
rob them of their prayers. 

Yes, it is time perhaps to wake them from 
their sleep of more than twenty centuries, to put 



The Race of Bronze 127 

them on their guard, and to see what yet they 
may be capable of, what surprises they may 
have in store for us after that long lethargy, 
which must surely have been restorative. In any 
case the human species, in course of deteriora- 
tion through overstrain, would find amongst 
these singers of the shaduf and these labourers 
with the antiquated plough, brains unclouded by 
alcohol, and a whole reserve of tranquil beauty, 
of well-balanced physique, of vigour untainted 
by bestiality. 



I 



A CHARMING LUNCHEON 



CHAPTER X 

A CHARMING LUNCHEON 

We are making our way through the fields of 
Abydos in the dazzling splendour of the forenoon, 
having come, like so many pilgrims of old, from 
the banks of the Nile to visit the sanctuaries of 
Osiris, which lie beyond the green plains, on the 
edge of the desert. 

It is a journey of some ten miles or so, under 
a clear sky and a burning sun. We pass through 
fields of corn and lucerne, whose wonderful 
green is piqued with little flowers, such as may 
be seen in our climate. Hundreds of little birds 
sing to us distractedly of the joy of life; the sun 
shines radiantly, magnificently; the impetuous 
corn is already in the ear; it might be some gay 
pageant of our days of May. One forgets that 
it is February, that we are still in the winter — 
the luminous winter of Egypt. 

Here and there amongst the outspread fields 
are villages buried under the thick foliage of 
trees — under acacias which, in the distance, re- 
semble ours at home; beyond indeed the moun- 
tain chain of Libya, like a wall confining the 
fertile fields, looks strange perhaps in its rose- 

131 



132 Egypt 

colour, and too desolate ; but, ne\^ertheless, amidst 
this glad music of the fields, these songs of larks 
and twitterings of sparrows, you scarcely realise 
that you are in a foreign land. 

Abydos! what magic there is in the name! 
" Abydos is at hand, and in another moment we 
shall be there." The mere words seem somehow 
to transform the aspect of the homely green 
fields, and make this pastoral region almost im- 
posing. The buzzing of the flies increases in 
the overheated air and the song of the birds sub- 
sides until at last it dies away in the approach 
of noon. 

We have been journeying a little more than 
an hour amongst the verdure of the growing 
corn that lies upon the fields like a carpet, when 
suddenly, beyond the little houses and trees of 
a village, quite a different world is disclosed — 
the familiar world of glare and death which 
presses so closely upon inhabited Egypt: the 
desert! the desert of Libya, and now as ever 
when we come upon it suddenly from the banks 
of the old river, it rises up before us; beginning 
at once, without transition, absolute and ter- 
rible, as soon as we leave the thick velvet of the 
last field, the cool shade of the last acacia. Its 
sands seem to slope towards us, in a prodigious 
incline, from the strange mountains that we saw 
from the happy plain, and which now appear. 



A Charming Luncheon 133 

enthroned beyond, like the monarchs of all this 
nothingness. 

The town of Abydos, which has vanished and 
left no wrack behind, rose once in this spot 
where we now stand, on the very threshold of 
the solitudes; but its necropoles, more venerated 
even than those of Memphis, and its thrice-holy 
temples, are a little farther on, in the marvel- 
lously conserving sand, which has buried them 
under its tireless waves and preserved them 
almost intact up till the present day. 

The desert! As soon as we put foot upon its 
shifting soil, which smothers the sound of our 
steps, the atmosphere too seems suddenly to 
change; it burns with a strange new heat, as if 
great fires had been lighted in the neighbourhood. 

And this whole domain of light and drought, 
right away into the distance, is shaded and 
streaked with the familiar brown, red and yellow 
colours. The mournful reflection of adjacent 
things augments to excess the heat and light. 
The horizon trembles under the little vapours 
of mirage like water ruffled by the wind. The 
background, which mounts gradually to the foot 
of the Libyan mountains, is strewn with the 
debris of bricks and stones — shapeless ruins 
which, though they scarcely rise above the sand, 
abound nevertheless in great numbers, and serve 
to remind us that here indeed is a very ancient 



13+ Egypt 

soil, where men laboured in centuries that have 
drifted out of knowledge. One divines instinc- 
tively and at once the catacombs, the hypogea 
and the mummies that lie beneath! 

These necropoles of Abydos once — ^and for 
thousands of years — exercised an extraordinary 
fascination over this people — the precursor of 
peoples — who dwelt in the valley of the Nile. 
According to one of the most ancient of human 
traditions, the head of Osiris, the lord of the 
other world, reposed in the depths of one of the 
temples which to-da}^ are buried in the sands. 
And men, as soon as their thought commenced 
to issue from the primeval night, were haunted 
by the idea that there were localities helpful, as 
it were, to the poor corpses that lay beneath 
the earth, that there were certain holy places 
where it behoved them to be buried if they 
wished to be ready when the signal of awakening 
was given. And in old Egypt, therefore, each 
one, at the hour of death, turned his thoughts 
to these stones and sands, in the ardent hope 
that he might be able to sleep near the remains 
of his god. And when the place was becoming 
crowded with sleepers, those who could obtain 
no place there conceived the idea of having 
himible obelisks planted on the holy ground, 
which at least should tell their names; or even 
recommended that their mummies might lie 



A Charming Luncheon 135 

there for some weeks, even if they were after- 
wards removed. And thus, funeral processions 
passed to and fro without ceasing through the 
cornfields that separate the Nile from the desert. 
Abydos! In the sad human dream dominated 
by the thought of dissolution, Abydos preceded 
by many centuries the Valley of Jehosophat of 
the Hebrews, the cemeteries around Mecca of the 
Moslems, and the holy tombs beneath our oldest 
cathedrals ! . . . Abydos ! It behoves us to walk 
here pensively and silently out of respect for all 
those thousands of souls who formerly turned 
towards this place, with outstretched hands, in 
the hour of death. 

The first great temple — that which King Seti 
raised to the mysterious Prince of the Other 
World, who in those days was called Osiris — is 
quite close — a distance of little more than 200 
yards in the glare of the desert. We come 
upon it suddenly, so that it almost startles us, 
for nothing warns us of its proximity. The 
sand from which it has been exhumed, and which 
buried it for 2000 years, still rises almost to its 
roof. Through an iron gate, guarded by two 
tall Bedouin guards in black robes, we plunge 
at once into the shadow of enormous stones. 
We are in the house of the god, in a forest of 
heavy Osiridean columns, surrounded by a world 
of people in high coiffures, carved in bas-relief 



136 Egypt 

on the pillars and walls — people who seem to 
be signalling one to another and exchanging 
amongst themselves mysterious signs, silently 
and for ever. 

But what is this noise in the sanctuary? It 
seems to be full of people. There, sure enough, 
beyond a second row of columns, is quite a little 
crowd talking loudly in English. I fancy that 
I can hear the clinking of glasses and the tap- 
ping of knives and forks. 

Oh! poor, poor temple, to what strange uses 
are you come. . . . This excess of grotesqueness 
in profanation is more insulting surely than to 
be sacked by barbarians! Behold a table set for 
some thirty guests, and the guests themselves — 
of both sexes — merry and lighthearted, belong to 
that special type of humanity which patronises 
Thomas Cook & Son (Egypt Ltd.) . They wear 
cork helmets, and the classic green spectacles; 
drink whisky and soda, and eat voraciously 
sandwiches and other viands out of greasy 
paper, which now litters the floor. And the 
women! Heavens! what scarecrows they are! 
And this kind of thing, so the black-robed 
Bedouin guards inform us, is repeated every 
day so long as the season lasts. A luncheon in 
the temple of Osiris is part of the programme of 
pleasure trips. Each day at noon a new band 
arrives, on heedless and unfortunate donkevs. 



A Charming Luncheon 137 

The tables and the crockery remain, of course, 
in the old temple! 

Let us escape quickly, if possible before the 
sight shall have become graven on our memory. 

But alas! even when we are outside, alone 
again on the expanse of dazzling sands, we can 
no longer take things seriously. Abydos and 
the desert have ceased to exist. The faces of 
those women remain to haunt us, their faces and 
their hats, and those looks which they vouchsafed 
us from over their solar spectacles. . . . The 
ugliness associated with the name of Cook was 
once explained to me in this wise, and the 
explanation at first sight seemed satisfactory: 
*' The United Kingdom, justifiably jealous of 
the beauty of its daughters, submits them to a 
jury when they reach the age of puberty; and 
those who are classed as too ugly to reproduce 
their kind are accorded an unlimited account 
at Thomas Cook & Sons, and thus vowed to a 
course of perpetual travel, which leaves them 
no time to think of certain trifles incidental to 
life." The explanation, as I say, seduced me for 
the time being. But a more attentive examina- 
tion of the bands who infest the valley of the 
Nile enables me to aver that all these good 
English ladies are of an age notoriously canon- 
ical: and the catastrophe of procreation, there- 
fore, supposing that such an accident could ever 



138 Egypt 

have happened to them, must date back to a time 
long anterior to their enrohiient. And I remain 
perplexed ! 

Without conviction now, we make our way 
towards another temple, guaranteed solitary. In- 
deed the sun blazes there a lonely sovereign in 
the midst of a profound silence, and Egypt and 
the past take us again into their folds. 

Once more to Osiris, the god of heavenly 
awakening in the necropolis of Abydos, this 
sanctuary was built by Ramses II. But the 
sands have covered it with their winding sheet 
in vain, and have been able to preserve for us 
only the lower and more deeply buried parts. 
]Men in their blind greed have destroyed the 
upper portions,^ and its ruins, protected and 
cleared as they are to-day, rise only some ten 
or twelve feet from the gromid. In the bas- 
reliefs the majority of the figures have only 
legs and a portion of the body; their heads 
and shoulders have disappeared with the upper 
parts of the walls. But they seem to have 
preserved their vitality: the gesticulations, the 
exaggerated pantomime of the attitudes of these 
headless things, are more strange, more striking, 

^ Not long ago a manufacturer, established in the neigh- 
bourhood, discovering that the limestone of its walls was friable, 
used this temple as a quarry, and for some years bas-reliefs 
beyond price served as aliment to the mills of the factory. 



A Charming Luncheon 139 

perhaps, than if their faces still remained. And 
they have preserved too, in an extraordinary- 
degree, the brightness of their antique paintings, 
the fresh tints of their costumes, of their robes 
of turquoise blue, or lapis, or emerald-green, or 
golden-yellow. It is an artless kind of fresco- 
work, which nevertheless amazes us by remain- 
ing perfect after thirty-five centuries. All that 
these people did seems as if made for immortal- 
ity. It is true, however, that such brilliant col- 
ours are not found in any of the other Pharaonic 
monuments, and that here they are heightened 
by the white background. For, notwithstanding 
the bluish, black and red granite of the porticoes, 
the walls are all of a fine limestone, of exceeding 
whiteness, and, in the holy of holies, of a pure 
alabaster. 

Above the truncated walls, with their bright 
clear colours, the desert appears, and shows quite 
brown by contrast; one sees the great yellow 
swell of sand and stones above the pictures of 
these decapitated people. It rises like a colossal 
wave and stretches out to bathe the foot of the 
Libyan mountains beyond. Towards the north 
and west of the solitudes, shapeless ruins of 
tawny -coloured blocks follow one another in the 
sands until the dazzling distance ends in a clear- 
cut line against the sky. Apart from this tem- 
ple of Ramses, where we now stand, and that 



i+o Egypt 

of Seti in the vicinity, where the enterprise of 
Thomas Cook & Son flourishes, there is nothing 
around us but ruins, crumbled and pulverised 
beyond all possible redemption. But they give 
us pause, these disappearing ruins, for they are 
the debris of that ageless temple, where sleeps 
the head of the god, the debris of the tombs of 
the Middle and Ancient Empires, and they indi- 
cate still the wide extent and development of the 
necropoles of Abydos, so old that it almost makes 
one giddy to think of their beginning. 

Here, as at Thebes and Memphis, the tombs 
of the Egyptians are met with only amongst 
the sands and the parched rocks. The great 
ancestral people, who would have shuddered at 
our black trees, and the corruption of the damp 
graves, liked to place its embalmed dead in the 
midst of this luminous, changeless splendour of 
death, which men call the desert. 
• .••••• 

And what is this now that is happening in 
the holy neighbourhood of unhappy Osiris? A 
troupe of donkeys, belaboured by Bedouin 
drivers, is being driven in the direction of the 
adjacent temple, dedicated to the god by Seti! 
The luncheon no doubt is over and the band 
about to depart, sharp to the appointed hour 
of the programme. Let us watch them from a 
prudent distance. 



A Charming Luncheon 14. i 

To be brief, they all mount into their saddles, 
these Cooks and Cookesses, and opening, not 
without a conscious air of majesty, their white 
cotton parasols, take themselves off in the direc- 
tion of the Nile. They disappear and the place 
belongs to us. 

When we venture at last to return to the first 
sanctuary, where they had lunched their fill 
in the shade, the guardians are busy clearing 
away the leavings and the dirty paper. And 
they pack the dubious crockery, which will be 
required for to-morrow's luncheon, into large 
chests on which may be read in large letters of 
glory the names of the veritable sovereigns of 
modern Egypt: " Thomas Cook & Son (Egypt 
Ltd.)." 

All this happily ends with the first hypostyle. 
Nothing dishonours the halls of the interior, 
where silence has again descended, the vast 
silence of the noon of the desert. 

In the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, men 
already marvelled at this temple, as at a relic of 
the most distant and nebulous past. The geog- 
rapher Strabo wrote in those days : "It is an 
admirable palace built in the fashion of the 
Labyrinth save that it has fewer galleries." 
There are galleries enough however, and one can 
readily lose oneself in its mazy turnings. Seven 
chapels, consecrated to Osiris and to different 



1+2 Egypt 

gods and goddesses of his suite; seven vaulted 
chambers; seven doors for the processions of 
kings and multitudes; and, at the sides, num- 
berless halls, corridors, secondary chapels, dark 
chambers and hidden doorwaj^s. That very 
primitive column, suggestive of reeds, which is 
called in architecture the " plant column " and 
resembles a monstrous stem of the papyrus, rises 
here in a thick forest, to support the stones of 
the blue ceilings, which are strewn with stars, in 
the likeness of the sky of tliis country. In many 
cases these stones are missing and leave large 
openings on to the real sky above. Their 
massiveness, which one might have thought 
would secure them an endless duration, has 
availed them nothing; the sun of so many 
centuries has cracked them, and their own 
weight, then, has brought them headlong to 
the ground. And floods of light now enter 
through the gaps, into the very chapels where 
the men of old had thought to ensure a holy 
gloom. 

Despite the disaster which has overtaken the 
ceilings, this is nevertheless one of the most 
perfect of the sanctuaries of ancient Egypt. 
The sands, those gentle sextons, have here suc- 
ceeded miraculously in their work of preserva- 
tion. They might have been carved yesterday, 
these innumerable people, who, everywhere — on 



A Charming Luncheon 14.3 

the walls, on this forest of columns — gesticulate 
and, with their arms and long hands, continue 
with animation their eternal mute conversation. 
The w^hole temple, with the openings which 
give it light, is more beautiful perhaps than 
in the time of the Pharaohs. In place of the 
old-time darkness, a transparent gloom now 
alternates with shafts of sunlight. Here and 
there the subjects of the bas-reliefs, so long 
buried in the darkness, are deluged with burning 
rays which detail their attitudes, their muscles, 
their scarcely altered colours, and endow them 
again with life and youth. There is no part of 
the wall, in this immense place, but is covered 
with divinities, with hieroglyphs and emblems. 
Osiris in high coiffure, the beautiful Isis in the 
helmet of a bird, jackal-headed Anubis, falcon- 
headed Horus, and ibis-headed Thoth are re- 
peated a thousand times, welcoming with strange 
gestures the kings and priests who are rendering 
them homage. 

The bodies, almost nude, with broad shoulders 
and slim waist, have a slenderness, a grace, 
infinitely chaste, and the features of the faces 
are of an exquisite purity. The artists who 
carved these charming heads, with their long 
eyes, full of the ancient dream, were already 
skilled in their art; but through a deficiency, 
which puzzles us, they were only able to draw 



144 Egypt 

them in profile. All the legs, all the feet are 
in profile too, although the bodies, on the 
other hand, face us fully. Men needed yet some 
centuries of study before they understood per- 
spective — which to us now seems so simple — 
and the foreshortening of figures, and were able 
to render the impression of them on a plane 
surface. 

Many of the pictures represent King Seti, 
drawn without doubt from life, for they show 
us almost the very features of his mummy, ex- 
hibited now in the museum at Cairo. At his 
side he holds affectionately his son, the prince- 
royal, Ramses (later on Ramses II., the great 
Sesostris of the Greeks). They have given the 
latter quite a frank air, and he wears a curl on 
the side of his head, as was the fashion then in 
childhood. He, also, has his mummy in a glass 
case in the museum, and anyone who has seen 
that toothless, sinister wreck, who had already 
attained the age of nearly a hundred years 
before death delivered him to the embalmers of 
Thebes, will find it difficult to believe that he 
could ever have been young, and worn his hair 
curled so; that he could even have played and 
been a child. 
• ...*. • 

We thought we had finished with the Cooks 
and Cookesses of the luncheon. But alas! our 



A Charming Luncheon 145 

horses, faster than their donkeys, overtake them 
in the return journey amongst the green corn- 
fields of Abydos; and in a stoppage in the 
narrow roadway, caused by a meeting with a 
number of camels laden with lucerne, we are 
brought to a halt in their midst. Almost 
touching me is a dear little white donkey, who 
looks at me pensively and in such a way that 
we at once understand one another. A mutual 
sympathy imites us. A Cookess in spectacles 
surmounts him — ^the most hideous of them all, 
bony and severe. Over her travelling costume, 
already sufficiently repulsive, she wears a tennis 
jersey, which accentuates the angularity of her 
figure, and in her person she seems the very 
incarnation of the respectability of the British 
Isles. It would be more equitable, too — so long 
are those legs of hers, which, to be sure, have 
scant interest for the tourist — if she carried the 
donkey. 

The poor little white thing regards me with 
melancholy. His ears twitch restlessly and his 
beautiful eyes, so fine, so observant of every- 
thing, say to me as plain as words: 

" She is a beauty, isn't she? " 

" She is, indeed, my poor little donkey. But 
think of this: fixed on thy back as she is, thou 
hast this advantage over me — ^thou seest her 
not!" 



146 Egypt 

But my reflection, though judicious enough, 
does not console hini, and his look answers me 
that he would be much prouder if he carried, like 
so many of liis comi^ades, a simple pack of sugar- 
canes. 



THE DOWNFALL 
OF THE NILE 



CHAPTER XI 

THE DOWNFALL OF THE NILE 

Some thousands of years ago, at the beginning 
of our geological period, when the continents 
had taken, in the last great upheaval, almost the 
forms by which we now know them, and when 
the rivers began to trace their hesitating courses, 
it happened that the rains of a whole watershed 
of Africa were precipitated in one formidable 
torrent across the uninhabitable region which 
stretches from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, 
and is called the region of the deserts. And 
this enormous waterway, lost as it was in the 
sands, by-and-by regulated its course: it became 
the Nile, and with untiring patience set itself to 
its proper task of river, which in this accursed 
zone might well have seemed an impossible one. 
First it had to round all the blocks of granite 
scattered in its way in the high plains of Nubia; 
and then, and more especially, to deposit, little 
by little, successive layers of mud, to form a 
living artery, to create, as it were, a long, green 
ribbon in the midst of this infinite domain of 
death. 

How long ago is it since the work of the great 
149 



I50 Egypt 

river began? There is something fearful in the 
thought. During the 5000 years of which we 
have any knowledge the incessant deposit of 
mud has scarcely widened this strip of inhabited 
Egypt, which at the most ancient period of 
history was almost as it is to-day. And as for 
the granite blocks on the plains of Nubia, how 
many thousands of years did it need to roll them 
and to polish them thus? In the times of the 
Pharaohs they already had their present rounded 
forms, worn smooth by the friction of the water, 
and the hieroglyphic inscriptions on their surfaces 
are not perceptibly effaced, though they have 
suffered the periodical inundation of the summer 
for some forty or fifty centuries! 

It was an exceptional country, this valley of 
the Nile; marvellous and unique; fertile without 
rain, watered according to its need by the great 
river, without the help of any cloud. It knew 
not the dull days and the humidity under which 
we suff er^ but kept always the changeless sky of 
the immense surrounding deserts, which exhaled 
no vapour that might dim the horizon. It was 
this eternal splendour of its light, no doubt, and 
this easiness of life, which brought forth here 
the first fruits of human thought. This same 
Nile, after having so patiently created the soil 
of Egypt, became also the father of that people, 
which led the way for all the others — like those 



The Downfall of the Nile 151 

early branches that one sees in spring, which 
shoot first from the stem, and sometimes die be- 
fore the summer. It nursed that people, whose 
least vestiges we discover to-day with surprise 
and wonder; a people who, in the very dawn, in 
the midst of the original barbarity, conceived 
magnificently the infinite and the divine; who 
placed with such certainty and grandeur the first 
architectural lines, from which afterwards our 
architecture was to be derived ; who laid the bases 
of art, of science, and of all knowledge. 

Later on, when this beautiful flower of human- 
ity was faded, the Nile, flowing always in the 
midst of its deserts, seems to have had for mission, 
during nearly two thousand years, the mainte- 
nance on its banks of a kind of immobility and 
desuetude, which was in a way a homage of re- 
spect for these stupendous relics. While the sand 
was burying the ruins of the temples and the bat- 
tered faces of the colossi, nothing changed under 
this sky of changeless blue. The same cultivation 
proceeded on the banks as in the oldest ages ; the 
same boats, with the same sails, went up and down 
the thread of water; the same songs kept time 
to the eternal human toil. The race of fellahs, 
the unconscious guardian of a prodigious past, 
slept on without desire of change, and almost 
without suffering. And time passed for Egypt 
in a great peace of sunlight and of death. 



152 Egypt 

But to-day the foreigners are masters here, 
and have wakened the old Nile — wakened to 
enslave it. In less than twenty years they 
have disfigured its valley, which until then had 
preserved itself like a sanctuary. They have 
silenced its cataracts, captured its precious water 
by dams, to pour it afar off on plains that are 
become like marshes and already sully with their 
mists the crystal clearness of the sky. The 
ancient rigging no longer suffices to water the 
land under cultivation. Machines worked by 
steam, which draw the water more quickly, 
commence to rise along the banks, side by side 
with new factories. Soon there will scarcely be 
a river more dishonoured than this, by iron 
chimneys and thick, black smoke. And it is 
happening apace, this exploitation of the Nile — 
hastily, greedily, as in a hunt for spoils. And 
thus all its beauty disappears, for its monotonous 
course, through regions endlessly alike, won us 
only by its calm and its old-world mystery. 

Poor Nile of the prodigies! One feels some- 
times still its departing charm, stray corners of 
it remain intact. There are days of transcendent 
clearness, incomparable evenings, when one may 
still forget the ugliness and the smoke. But the 
classic expedition by dahabiya, the ascent of the 
river from Cairo to Nubia, will soon have ceased 
to be worth making. 



SUNSET ON THE BANKS OF THE NILE 



The Downfall of the Nile 153 

Ordinarily this voyage is made in the winter, 
so that the traveller may follow the course of the 
sun as it makes its escape towards the southern 
hemisphere. The water then is low and the 
valley parched. Leaving the cosmopolitan town 
of modern Cairo, the iron bridges, and the pre- 
tentious hotels, with their flaunting inscriptions, 
it imparts a sense of sudden peacefulness to pass 
along the large and rapid waters of this river, 
between the curtains of palm-trees on the banks, 
borne by a dahabiya where one is master and, if 
one likes, may be alone. 

At first, for a day or two, the great haunting 
triangles of the pyramids seem to follow you, 
those of Dashur and that of Sakkarah succeeding 
to those of Gizeh. For a long time the horizon 
is disturbed by their gigantic silhouettes. As 
we recede from them, and they disengage them- 
selves better from neighbouring things, they 
seem, as happens in the case of mountains, to 
grow higher. And when they have finally dis- 
appeared, we have still to ascend slowly and by 
stages some six hundred miles of river before we 
reach the first cataract. Our way lies through 
monotonous desert regions where the hours and 
days are marked chiefly by the variations of the 
wonderful light. Except for the phantasmagoria 
of the mornings and evenings, there is no out- 
standing feature on these dull-coloured banks, 



154- Egypt 

where may be seen, with never a change at all, 
the humble pastoral life of the fellahs. The sun 
is burning, the starlit nights clear and cold. A 
withering wind, which blows almost without 
ceasing from the north, makes you shiver as 
soon as the twilight falls. 

One may travel for league after league along 
this slimy water and make head for days and 
weeks against its current — which glides ever- 
lastingly past the dahabiya, in little hurrying 
waves — without seeing this warm, fecundating 
river, compared with which our rivers of France 
are mere negligible streams, either diminish or 
increase or hasten. And on the right and left 
of us as we pass are unfolded indefinitely the 
two parallel chains of barren limestone, which 
imprison so narrowly the Egypt of the harvests: 
on the west that of the Libyan desert, which 
every morning the first rays of the sun tint with 
a rosy coral that nothing seems to dull; and in 
the east that of the desert of Arabia, which 
never fails in the evening to retain the light of 
the setting sun, and looks then like a mournful 
girdle of glowing embers. Sometimes the two 
parallel walls sheer off and give more room to the 
green fields, to the woods of palm-trees, and the 
little oases, separated by streaks of golden sand. 
Sometimes they approach so closely to the Nile 
that habitable Egypt is no wider than some two 



The Downfall of the Nile 155 

or three poor fields of corn, lying right on the 
water's edge, behind which the dead stones and 
the dead sands commence at once. And some- 
times, even, the desert chain closes in so as to 
overhang the river with its reddish-white cliffs, 
which no rain ever comes to freshen, and in 
which, at different heights, gape the square holes 
leading to the habitations of the mmnmies. 
These mountains, which in the distance look so 
beautiful in their rose-colour, and make, as it 
were, interminable back-cloths to all that hap- 
pens on the river banks, were perforated, during 
some 5000 years, for the introduction of sarco- 
phagi and now they swarm with old dead 
bodies. 

And all that passes on the banks, indeed, 
changes as little as the background. 

First there is that gesture, supple and superb, 
but always the same, of the women in their long 
black robes w^ho come without ceasing to fill 
their long-necked jars and carry them away 
balanced on their veiled heads. Then the flocks 
which shepherds, draped in mourning, bring to 
the river to drink, goats and sheep and asses all 
mixed up together. And then the buffaloes, 
massive and mud-coloured, who descend calmly 
to bathe. And, finally, the great labour of the 
watering: the traditional noria, turned by a little 
bull with bandaged eyes and, above all, the 



156 Egypt 

shaduf, worked by men whose naked bodies 
stream with the cold water. 

The shadufs follow one another sometimes as 
far as the eye can see. It is strange to watch 
the movement — confused in the distance — of all 
these long rods which pmnp the water without 
ceasing, and look like the swaying of living 
antennae. The same sight was to be seen along 
this river in the times of the Ramses. But 
suddenly, at some bend of the river, the old 
Pharaonic rigging disappears, to give place to 
a succession of steam machines, which, more 
even than the muscles of the fellahs, are busy at 
the water-drawing. Before long their blackish 
chimneys will make a continuous border to the 
tamed Nile. 

Did one not know their bearings, the great 
ruins of this Egypt would pass unnoticed. With 
a few rare exceptions they lie beyond the green 
plains on the threshold of the solitudes. And 
against the changeless, rose-coloured background 
of these cliffs of the desert, which follow you 
during the whole of this tranquil navigation of 
some 600 miles, are to be seen only the humble 
towns and villages of to-day, which have the 
neutral colour of the ground. Some openwork 
minarets dominate them — ^white spots above the 
prevailing dulness. Clouds of pigeons whirl 
round in the neighbourhood. And amongst the 



The Downfall of the Nile 157 

little houses, which are only cubes of mud, baked 
in the sun, the palm-trees of Africa, either singly 
or in mighty clusters, rise superbly and cast on 
these little habitations the shade of their palms 
which sway in the wind. Not long ago, although 
indeed everything in these little towns was 
mournful and stagnant, one would have been 
tempted to stop in passing, drawn by that name- 
less peace that belonged to the Old East and to 
Islam. But, now, before the smallest hamlet — 
amongst the beautiful primitive boats, that still 
remain in great numbers, pointing their yards, 
like very long reeds, into the sky — ^there is always, 
for the meeting of the tourist boats, an enormous 
black pontoon, which spoils the whole scene by 
its presence and its great advertising inscription: 
"Thomas Cook & Son (Egypt Ltd.)." And, 
what is more, one hears the whistling of the rail- 
way, which runs mercilessly along the river, 
bringing from the Delta to the Soudan the hordes 
of European invaders. And to crown all, ad- 
joining the station is inevitably some modern 
factory, throned there in a sort of irony, and 
dominating the poor crumbling things that still 
presume to tell of Egypt and of mystery. 

And so now, except at the towns or villages 
which lead to celebrated ruins, we stop no longer. 
It is necessary to proceed farther and for the 
halt of the night to seek an obscure hamlet, a 



158 Egypt 

silent recess, where we may moor our dahabiya 
against the venerable earth of the bank. 

And so one goes on, for days and weeks, 
between these two interminable cliffs of reddish 
chalk, filled with their hypogea and mummies, 
which are the walls of the valley of the Nile, 
and will follow us up to the first cataract, until 
our entrance into Nubia. There only will the 
appearance and nature of the rocks of the desert 
change, to become the more sombre granite 
out of which the Pharaohs carved their obelisks 
and the great figures of their gods. 

We go on and on, ascending the thread of this 
eternal cmTent, and the regularity of the wind, 
the persistent clearness of the sky, the monotony 
of the great river, which winds but never ends, 
all conspire to make us forget the hours and days 
that pass. However deceived and disappointed 
we may be at seeing the profanation of the river 
banks, here, nevertheless, isolated on the water, 
we do not lose the peace of being a wanderer, a 
stranger amongst an equipage of silent Arabs, 
who every evening prostrate themselves in con- 
fiding prayer. 

And, moreover, we are moving towards the 
south, towards the sun, and every day has a more 
entrancing clearness, a more caressing warmth, 
and the bronze of the faces that we see on our 
way takes on a deeper tint. 



The Downfall of the Nile 159 

And then too one mixes intimately with the 
life of the river bank, which is still so absorbing 
and, at certain hours, when the horizon is un- 
sullied by the smoke of pit-coal, recalls you to 
the days of artless toil and healthy beauty. In 
the boats that meet us, half -naked men, revelling 
in their movement, in the sun and air, sing, as 
they ply their oars, those songs of the Nile that 
are as old as Thebes or Memphis. When the 
wind rises there is a riotous unfurling of sails, 
which, stretched on their long yards, give to 
the dahabiyas the air of birds in full flight. 
Bending right over in the wind, they skim along 
with a lively motion, carrying their cargoes of 
men and beasts and primitive things. Women 
are there draped still in the ancient fashion, and 
sheep and goats, and sometimes piles of fruit 
and gourds, and sacks of grain. Many are laden 
to the water's edge with those earthenware jars, 
unchanged for 3000 years, which the fellaheens 
know how to place on their heads with so much 
grace — and one sees these heaps of fragile pottery 
gliding along the water as if carried by the 
gigantic wings of a gull. And in the far-off, al- 
most fabulous, days the life of the mariners of the 
Nile had the same aspect, as is shown by the bas- 
reliefs on the oldest tombs; it required the same 
play of muscles and of sails; was accompanied 
no doubt by the same songs, and was subject to 



i6o Egypt 

the withering caress of this same desert wind. 
And then, as now, the same unchanging rose col- 
oured the continuous curtain of the mountains. 

But all at once there is a noise of machinery, 
and whistlings, and in the air, which was just 
now so pure, rise noxious columns of black 
smoke. The modem steamers are coming, and 
throw into disorder the flotillas of the past: 
colliers that leave great eddies in their wake, or 
perhaps a wearisome lot of those three-decked 
tourist boats, which make a great noise as they 
plough the water, and are laden for the most 
part with ugly women, snobs and imbeciles. 

Poor, poor Nile! which reflected formerly on 
its warm mirror the utmost of earthly splendour, 
which bore in its time so many barques of gods 
and goddesses in procession behind the golden 
barge of Amen, and knew in the dawn of the 
ages only an impeccable purity, alike of the 
human form and of architectural design! What 
a downfall is here! To be awakened from 
that disdainful sleep of twenty centuries and 
made to carry the floating barracks of Thomas 
Cook & Son, to feed sugar factories, and to ex- 
haust itself in nourishing with its mud the raw 
material for Enghsh cotton-stuffs. 



IN THE TEMPLE OF THE 
GODDESS OF LOVE AND JOY 



CHAPTER XII 

IN THE TEMPLE OF THE GODDESS OF LOVE 

AND JOY 

It is the month of March, but as gay and 
splendid as in our June. Around us are fields 
of corn, of lucerne, and the flowering bean. 
And the air is full of restless birds, singing 
deliriously for very joy in the voluptuous busi- 
ness of their nests and coveys. Our way lies over 
a fertile soil, saturated with vital substances — 
some paradise for beasts no doubt, for they swarm 
on every side: flocks of goats with a thousand 
bleating kids; she-asses mth their frisking 
young; cows and cow-buffaloes feeding their 
calves; all turned loose among the crops, to 
browse at their leisure, as if there were here a 
superabundance of the riches of the soil. 

What country is this that shows no sign of 
human habitation, that knows no village, nor 
any distant spire? The crops are like ours at 
home — wheat, lucerne, and the flowering bean 
that perfumes the air with its white blossoms. 
But there is an excess of light in the sky and, 
in the distance, an extraordinary clearness. 
And then these fertile plains, that might be 
163 



I 64 Egypt 

those of some " Promised Land," seem to be 
bounded far away, on left and right, by two 
parallel stone walls, two chains of rose-coloured 
mountains, whose aspect is obviously desertlike. 
Besides, amongst the numerous animals that are 
familiar, there are camels, feeding their strange 
nurslings that look like four-legged ostriches. 
And finally some peasants appear beyond in the 
cornfields ; they are veiled in long black draperies. 
It is the East then, an African land, or some 
oasis of Arabia ? 

The sun at this moment is hidden from us 
by a band of clouds, that stretches, right above 
our head, from one end of the sky to the other, 
like a long skein of white wool. It is alone in 
the blue void, and seems to make more peaceful, 
and even a little mysterious, the wonderful light 
of the fields we traverse — these fields intoxicated 
with life and vibrant with the music of birds; 
while, by contrast, the distant landscape, un- 
shaded by clouds, is resplendent with a more 
incisive clearness and the desert beyond seems 
deluged with rays. 

The pathway that we have been following, ill 
defined as it is in the grassy fields, leads us at 
length under a large ruinous portico — a relic of 
goodness knows what olden days — which still 
rises here, quite isolated, altogether strange and 
unexpected, in the midst of the green expanse 



Temple of the Goddess of Love 165 

of pasture and tillage. We had seen it from 
a great distance, so pure and clear is the air; 
and in approaching it we perceive that it is 
colossal, and in relief on its Hntel is designed 
a globe with two long wings outspread sym- 
metrically. 

It behoves us now to make obeisance with 
almost religious reverence, for this winged disc 
is a symbol which gives at length an indication 
of the place inmiediate and absolute. It is 
Egypt, the country — Egypt, our ancient mother. 
And there before us must once have stood a 
temple reverenced of the people, or some great 
vanished town; its fragments of columns and 
sculptured capitals are strewn about in the fields 
of lucerne. How inexplicable it seems that 
this land of ancient splendours, which never 
ceased indeed to be nutritive and prodigiously 
fertile, should have returned, for some hundreds 
of years now, to the humble pastoral life of the 
peasants. 

Through the green crops and the assembled 
herds our pathway seems to lead to a kind of hill 
rising alone in the midst of the plains — a hill 
which is neither of the same colour nor the same 
nature as the mountains of the surrounding des- 
erts. Behind us the portico recedes httle by lit- 
tle in the distance; its tall imposing silhouette, 
so mournful and solitary, throws an infinite sad- 



1 66 Egypt 

ness on this sea of meadows, which spread 
their peace where once was a centre of mag- 
nificence. 

The wind now rises in sharp, lashing gusts 
— the wind of Egypt that never seems to fall, 
and is bitter and wintry for all the burning of 
the sun. The growing corn bends before it, 
showing the gloss of its young quivering leaves, 
and the herded beasts move close to one another 
and turn their backs to the squall. 

As we draw nearer to this singular hill it is 
revealed as a mass of ruins. And the ruins are 
all of a kind, of a brownish-red. They are the re- 
mains of the colonial towns of the Romans, which 
subsisted here for some two or three hundred 
years (an almost negligible moment of time in 
the long history of Egypt), and then fell to 
pieces, to become in time mere shapeless mounds 
on the fertile margins of the Nile and sometimes 
even in the submerging sands. 

A heap of little reddish bricks that once were 
fashioned into houses; a heap of broken jars 
or amphorge — myriads of them — that served to 
carry the water from the old nourishing river; 
and the remains of walls, repaired at diverse 
epochs, where stones inscribed with hieroglyphs 
he upside down against fragments of Grecian 
obehsks or Coptic sculptures or Roman capitals. 
In our countries, where the past is of yesterday, 



Temple of the Goddess of Love 167 

we have nothing resembUng such a chaos of dead 
things. 

Nowadays the sanctuary is reached through 
a large cutting in this hill of ruins; incredible 
heaps of bricks and broken pottery enclose it on 
all sides like a jealous rampart. Until recently 
indeed they covered it almost to its roof. From 
the very first its appearance is disconcerting: it 
is so grand, so austere and gloomy. A strange 
dwelling, to be sure, for the Goddess of Love and 
Joy. It seems more fit to be the home of the 
Prince of Darkness and of Death. A severe 
doorway, built of gigantic stones and surmounted 
by a winged disc, opens on to an asylum of 
religious mystery, on to depths where massive 
columns disappear in the darkness of deep 
night. 

Immediately on entering there is a coolness 
and a resonance as of a sepulchre. First, the 
pronaos, where we still see clearly, between 
pillars carved with hieroglyphs. Were it not 
for the large human faces which serve for the 
capitals of the columns, and are the image of the 
lovely Hathor, the goddess of the place, this 
temple of the decadent epoch would scarcely 
differ from those built in this country two thou- 
sand years before. It has the same square 
massiveness. 

And in the dark blue ceilings there are the 



i68 Egypt 

same frescoes, filled with stars, with the signs of 
the Zodiac, and series of winged discs; in bas- 
relief on the walls, the same multitudinous crowds 
of people who gesticulate and make signs to 
one another with their hands — eternally the same 
mysterious signs, repeated to infinity, everywhere 
— in the palaces, the hypogea, the syringes, and 
on the sarcophagi and papyri of the mummies. 

The Memphite and Theban temples, which 
preceded this by so many centuries, and far 
surpassed it in grandeur, have all lost, in conse- 
quence of the falling of the enormous granites 
of their roofs, their cherished gloom, and, what is 
the same thing, their religious mystery. But in 
the temple of the lovely Hathor, on the con- 
trary, except for some figures mutilated by the 
hammers of Christians or Moslems, everything 
has remained intact, and the lofty ceilings still 
throw their fearsome shadows. 

The gloom deepens in the hypostyle which 
follows the pronaos. Then come, one after 
another, two halls of increasing holiness, where 
the daylight enters regretfully through narrow 
loopholes, barely lighting the superposed rows of 
innumerable figures that gesticulate on the walls. 
And then, after other majestic corridors, we reach 
the heart of this heap of terrible stones, the holy 
of holies, enveloped in deep gloom. The hiero- 
glyphic inscriptions name this place the " Hall 



Temple of the Goddess of Love 169 

of Mystery " and formerly the high priest alone, 
and he only once in each year, had the right to 
enter it for the performance of some now un- 
known rites. 

The " Hall of Mystery " is empty to-day, 
despoiled long since of the emblems of gold and 
precious stones that once filled it. The meagre 
little flames of the candles we have lit scarcely 
pierce the darkness which thickens over our 
heads towards the granite ceilings; at the most 
they only allow us to distinguish on the walls of 
the vast rectangular cavern the serried ranks of 
figures who exchange among themselves their dis- 
concerting mute conversations. 

Towards the end of the ancient and at the 
beginning of the Christian era, Egypt, as we 
know, still exercised such a fascination over the 
world, by its ancestral prestige, by the memory 
of its dominating past, and the sovereign per- 
manence of its ruins, that it imposed its gods 
upon its conquerors, its handwriting, its archi- 
tecture, nay, even its religious rites and its 
mummies. The Ptolemies built temples here, 
which reproduce those of Thebes and Abydos. 
Even the Romans, although they had already 
discovered the vault, followed here the primitive 
models, and continued those granite ceilings, 
made of monstrous slabs, placed flat, like our 
beams. And so this temple of Hathor, built 



I70 Egypt 

though it was in the time of Cleopatra and 
Augustus, on a site venerable in the oldest 
antiquity, recalls at first sight some conception 
of the Ramses. 

If, however, you examine it more closely, there 
appears, particularly in the thousands of figures 
in bas-relief, a considerable divergence. The 
poses are the same indeed, and so too are the 
traditional gestures. But the exquisite grace of 
line is gone, as well as the hieratic calm of the 
expressions and the smiles. In the Egyptian art 
of the best periods the slender figures are as 
pure as the flowers they hold in their hands; 
their muscles may be indicated in a precise and 
skilful manner, but they remain, for all that, 
immaterial. The god Amen himself, the pro- 
creator, drawn often with an absolute crudity, 
would seem chaste compared with the hosts of 
this temple. For here, on the contrary, the 
figures might be those of living people, palpitat- 
ing and voluptuous, who had posed themselves 
for sport in these consecrated attitudes. The 
throat of the beautiful goddess, her hips, her un- 
veiled nakedness, are portrayed with a searching 
and lingering realism; the flesh seems almost to 
quiver. She and her spouse, the beautiful Horus, 
son of Isis, contemplate each other there, naked, 
one before the other, and their laughing eyes are 
intoxicated with love. 



Temple of the Goddess of Love 171 

Around the holy of hoHes is a number of halls, 
in deep shadow and massive as so many for- 
tresses. They were used formerly for mysterious 
and complicated rites, and in them, as every- 
where else, there is no corner of the wall but is 
overloaded with figures and hieroglyphs. Bats 
are asleep in the blue ceilings, where the winged 
discs, painted in fresco, look like flights of birds ; 
and the hornets of the neighbouring fields have 
built their nests there in hundreds, so that they 
hang like stalactites. 

Several staircases lead to the vast terraces 
formed by the great roofs of the temple — stair- 
cases narrow, stifling and dimly lighted by loop- 
holes that reveal the heart-breaking thickness of 
the walls. And here again are the inevitable 
rows of figures, carved on all the walls, in the 
same familiar attitudes; they mount with us as 
we ascend, making all the time the self-same 
signs one to another. 

As we emerge on to the roofs, bathed now in 
Egyptian sunlight and swept by a cold and bitter 
wind, we are greeted by a noise as of an aviary. 
It is the kingdom of the sparrows, who have 
built their nests in thousands in this temple of 
the complaisant goddess. They twitter now all 
together and with all their might out of very joy 
of living. It is an esplanade, this roof — a solitude 
paved with gigantic flagstones. From it we see. 



112 Egypt 

beyond the heaps of ruins, those happy plains, 
which are spread out with such a perfectly seren- 
ity on the very ground where once stood the 
town of Denderah, beloved of Hathor and one 
of the most famous of Upper Egypt. Exquisitely 
green are these plains with the new growth of 
wheat and lucerne and bean; and the herds 
that are grouped here and there on the fresh 
verdure of the level pastures, swaying now and 
vmdulating in the wind, look like so many dark 
patches. And the two chains of mountains of 
rose-coloured stone, that run parallel — on the 
east that of the desert of Arabia, on the west 
that of the Libyan desert — enclose, in the dis- 
tance, this valley of the Nile, this land of plenty, 
which, alike in antiquity as in our days, has ex- 
cited the greed of predatory races. The temple 
has also some underground dependencies or 
crypts into which you descend by staircases as of 
dungeons; sometimes even you have to crawl 
through holes to reach them. Long superposed 
galleries which might serve as hiding places for 
treasure; long corridors recalling those which, in 
bad dreams, threaten to close in and bury you. 
And the innumerable figures, of course, are here 
too, gesticulating on the walls; and endless rep- 
resentations of the lovely goddess, whose swell- 
ing bosom, which has preserved almost in- 
tact the flesh colour applied in the times of 



Temple of the Goddess of Love 173 

the Ptolemies, we have perforce to graze as we 

pass. 

• ••••., 

In one of the vestibules that we have to tra- 
verse on our way out of the sanctuary, amongst 
the numerous bas-reliefs representing various 
sovereigns paying homage to the beautiful 
Hathor, is one of a young man, crowned with a 
royal tiara shaped like the head of a urasus. He 
is shown seated in the traditional Pharaonic pose 
and is none other than the Emperor Nero! 

The hieroglyphs of the cartouche are there 
to affirm his identity, albeit the sculptor, not 
knowing his actual physiognomy, has given him 
the traditional features, regular as those of the 
god Horus. During the centuries of the Roman 
domination the Western emperors used to send 
from home instructions that their likeness should 
be placed on the walls of the temples, and 
that offerings should be made in their name to 
the Egyptian divinities — and this notwithstand- 
ing that in their eyes Egypt must have seemed 
so far away, a colony almost at the end of the 
earth. (And it was such a goddess as this, of 
secondary rank in the times of the Pharaohs, that 
was singled out as the favourite of the Romans 
of the decadence.) 

The Emperor Nero! As a matter of fact at 
the very time these bas-reliefs — almost the last 



174 Egypt 

— and these expiring hieroglyphics were being 
inscribed, the confused primitive theogonies had 
ahnost reached their end and the days of the 
Goddess of Joy were numbered. There had 
been conceived in Judaea symbols more lofty and 
more pure, which were to rule a great part of the 
world for two thousand years — afterwards, alas, 
to decline in their turn; and men were about 
to throw themselves passionately into renuncia- 
tion, asceticism and fraternal pity. 

How strange it is to say it! Even while the 
sculptor was carving this archaic bas-relief, and 
was using, for the engraving of its name, char- 
acters that dated back to the night of the ages, 
there were already Christians assembled in the 
catacombs at Rome and dying in ecstasy in the 
arena! 



MODERN LUXOR 



I 



CHAPTER XIII 

MODERN LUXOR 

The waters of the Nile being already low, my 
dahabiya — delayed by strandings — had not been 
able to reach Luxor, and we had moored our- 
selves, as the darkness began to fall, at a casual 
spot on the bank. 

" We are quite near," the pilot had told me 
before departing to make his evening prayer; 
" in an hour, to-morrow, we shall be there." 

And the gentle night descended upon us in 
this spot which did not seem to differ at all from 
so many others where, for a month past now, 
we had moored our boat at hazard to await the 
daybreak. On the banks were dark confused 
masses of foliage, above which here and there a 
high date-palm outlined its black plumes. The 
air was filled with the multitudinous chirpings of 
the crickets of Upper Egypt, which make their 
music here almost throughout the year in the 
odorous warmth of the grass. And, presently, 
in the midst of the silence, rose the cries of the 
night birds, like the mournful mewings of cats. 
And that was all — save for the infinite calm of 
177 



178 Egypt 

the desert that is always present, dominating 
everything, although scarcely noticed and, as it 
were, latent. 

And this morning, at the rising of the sun, is 
pure and splendid as all other mornings. A tint 
of rosy coral comes gradually to life on the 
simimit of the Libyan mountains, standing out 
from the gridelin shadows which, in the heavens, 
were the rearguard of the night. 

But my eyes, grown accustomed during the 
last few weeks to this glorious spectacle of the 
dawn, turn themselves as if by force of some 
attraction, towards a strange and quite unusual 
thing, which, less than a mile away along the 
river, on the Arabian bank, rises upright in the 
midst of the mournful plains. At first it looks 
like a mass of towering rocks, which in this hour 
of twilight magic have taken on a pale violet 
colour, and seem almost transparent. And the 
sun, scarcely emerged from the desert, lights 
them in a curious gradation, and borders their 
contours with a fringe of fresh rose-colour. And 
they are not rocks, in fact, for as we look more 
closely, they show us lines symmetrical and 
straight. Not rocks, but architectural masses, 
tremendous and superhuman, placed there in 
attitudes of quasi-eternal stability. And out of 
them rise the points of two obelisks, sharp as the 



Modern Luxor 179 

blade of a lance. And then, at once, I under- 
stand — Thebes ! 

Thebes! Last evening it was hidden in the 
shadow and I did not know it was so near. But 
Thebes assuredly it is, for nothing else in the 
world could produce such an apparition. And 
I salute with a kind of shudder of respect this 
unique and sovereign ruin, which had haunted 
me for many years, but which until now life had 
not left me time to visit. 

And now for Luxor, which in the epoch of 
the Pharaohs was a suburb of the royal town, 
and is still its port. It is there, it seems, where 
we must stop our dahabiya in order to proceed 
to the fabulous palace which the rising sun has 
just disclosed to us. 

And while my equipage of bronze — intoning 
that song, as old as Egypt and everlastingly the 
same, which seems to help the men in their 
arduous work — is busy unfastening the chain 
which binds us to the bank, I continue to watch 
the distant apparition. It emerges gradually 
from the light morning mists which, perhaps, 
made it seem even larger than it is. The clear 
light of the ascending sun shows it now in 
detail; and reveals it as all battered, broken and 
ruinous in the midst of a silent plain, on the 
yellow carpet of the desert. And how this sun, 
rising in its clear splendour, seems to crush it 



i8o Egypt 

with its youth and stupendous duration. This 
same sun had attained to its present round form, 
had acquired the clear precision of its disc, and 
begnn its daily promenade over the country of 
the sands, countless centuries of centuries, be- 
fore it saw, as it might be yesterday, this town 
of Thebes arise; an attempt at magnificence 
which seemed to promise for the human pygmies 
a sufficiently interesting future, but which, in 
the event, we have not been able even to equal. 
And it proved, too, a thing quite puny and 
derisory, since here it is laid low, after having 
subsisted barely four negligible thousands of 

years. 

• •••••• 

An hour later we arrive at Luxor, and what 
a surprise awaits us there! 

The thing which dominates the whole town, 
and may be seen five or six miles away, is the 
Winter Palace, a hasty modern production which 
has grown on the border of the Nile during the 
past year: a colossal hotel, obviously sham, made 
of plaster and mud, on a framework of iron. 
Twice or three times as high as the admirable 
Pharaonic temple, its impudent facade rises there, 
painted a dirty yellow. One such thing, it will 
readily be understood, is sufficient to disfigure 
pitiably the whole of the surroundings. The old 
Arab town, with its little white houses, its mina- 



Modern Luxor i8i 

rets and its palm-trees, might as well not exist. 
The famous temple and the forest of heavy 
Osiridean columns admire themselves in vain 
in the waters of the river. It is the end of 
Luxor. 

And what a crowd of people is here! While, 
on the contrary, the opposite bank seems so 
absolutely desertlike, with its stretches of golden 
sand and, on the horizon, its mountains of the 
colour of glowing embers, which, as we know, are 
full of mummies. 

Poor Luxor! Along the banks is a row of 
tourist boats, a sort of two or three storeyed 
barracks, which nowadays infest the Nile from 
Cairo to the Cataracts. Their whistlings and the 
vibration of their dynamos make an intolerable 
noise. How shall I find a quiet place for my 
dahabiya, where the functionaries of Messrs Cook 
will not come to disturb me? 

We can now see nothing of the palaces of 
Thebes, whither I am to repair in the evening. 
We are farther from them than we were last 
night. The apparition during our morning's 
journey had slowly receded in the plains flooded 
by sunlight. And then the Winter Palace and 
the new boats shut out the view. 

But this modern quay of Luxor, where I dis- 
embark at ten o'clock in the morning in clear and 
radiant sunshine, is not without its amusing side. 



1 82 Egypt 

In a line with the Winter Palace a number 
of stalls follow one another. All those things with 
which our tourists are wont to array themselves 
are on sale there: fans, fly flaps, helmets and 
blue spectacles. And, in thousands, photographs 
of the ruins. And there too are the toys, the 
souvenirs of the Soudan: old negro knives, 
panther-skins and gazelle horns. Numbers of 
Indians even are come to this improvised fair, 
bringing their stuffs from Rajputana and Cash- 
mere. And, above all, there are dealers in 
mummies, offering for sale mysteriously shaped 
coflins, mummy-cloths, dead hands, gods, scarabaei 
— and the thousand and one things that this old 
soil has yielded for centuries like an inexhaustible 
mine. 

Along the stalls, keeping in the shade of the 
houses and the scattered palms, pass representa- 
tives of the plutocracy of the world. Dressed 
by the same costumiers, bedecked in the same 
plumes, and with faces reddened by the same sun, 
the millionaire daughters of Chicago merchants 
elbow their sisters of the old nobility. Pressing 
amongst them impudent young Bedouins pester 
the fair travellers to mount their saddled donkeys. 
And as if they were charged to add to this babel 
a note of beauty, the battalions of Mr Cook, of 
both sexes, and always in a hurry, pass by with 
long strides. 



Modern Luxor 183 

Beyond the shops, following the line of the 
quay, there are other hotels. Less aggressive, 
all of them, than the Winter Palace, they have 
had the discretion not to raise themselves too high, 
and to cover their fronts with white chalk in 
the Arab fashion, even to conceal themselves in 
clusters of palm-trees. 

And finally there is the colossal temple of 
Luxor, looking as out of place now as the 
poor obelisk which Egypt gave us as a present, 
and which stands to-day in the Place de la 
Concorde. 

Bordering the Nile, it is a colossal grove of 
stone, about three hundred yards in length. In 
epochs of a magnificence that is now scarcely 
conceivable this forest of columns grew high 
and thick, rising impetuously at the bidding of 
Amenophis and the great Ramses. And how 
beautiful it must have been even yesterday, 
dominating in its superb disarray this surround- 
ing country, vovv^ed for centuries to neglect and 
silence ! 

But to-day, with all these things that men 
have built around it, you might say that it no 
longer exists. 

We reach an iron-barred gate and, to enter, 
have to show our permit to the guards. Once 
inside the immense sanctuary, perhaps we shall 
find solitude again. But, alas, under the profaned 



1 8+ Egypt 

columns a crowd of people passes, with Baedekers 
in their hands, the same people that one sees 
here everywhere, the same world as frequents 
Nice and the Riviera. And, to crown the mock- 
ery, the noise of the dynamos pursues us even 
here, for the boats of Messrs Cook are moored to 
the bank close by. 

Hundreds of columns, columns which are 
anterior by many centuries to those of Greece, 
and represent, in their naive enormity, the first 
conceptions of the human brain. Some are fluted 
and give the impression of sheaves of monstrous 
reeds; others, quite plain and simple, imitate the 
stem of the papyrus, and bear by way of capital 
its strange flower. The tourists, like the flies, 
enter at certain times of the day, which it suflices 
to know. Soon the little bells of the hotels will 
call them away and the hour of midday will find 
me here alone. But what in heaven's name will 
deliver me from the noise of the dynamos? But 
look! beyond there, at the bottom of the sanctu- 
aries, in the part which should be the holy of 
holies, that great fresco, now half effaced, but 
still clearly visible on the wall — ^how unexpected 
and arresting it is! An image of Christ! Christ 
crowned with the Byzantine aureole. It has been 
painted on a coarse plaster, which seems to have 
been added by an unskilful hand, and is wearing 
off and exposing the hieroglyphs beneath. . . . 



Modern Luxor 185 

This temple, in fact, almost indestructible by 
reason of its massiveness, has passed through the 
hands of diverse masters. Its antiquity was al- 
ready legendary in the time of Alexander the 
Great, on whose behalf a chapel was added to 
it; and later on, in the first ages of Christianity, 
a comer of the ruins was turned into a cathedral. 
The tourists begin to depart, for the lunch bell 
calls them to the neighbouring tables d'hote ; and 
while I wait till they shall be gone, I occupy 
myself in following the bas-reliefs which are dis- 
played for a length of more than a hundred yards 
along the base of the walls. It is one long row 
of people moving in their thousands all in the 
same direction — the ritual procession of the God 
Amen. With the care which characterised the 
Egyptians to draw everything from life so as to 
render it eternal, there are represented here the 
smallest details of a day of festival three or four 
thousand years ago. And how like it is to a holi- 
day of the people of to-day ! Along the route of 
the procession are ranged jugglers and sellers of 
drinks and fruits, and negro acrobats who walk 
on their hands and twist themselves into all kinds 
of contortions. But the procession itself was evi- 
dently of a magnificence such as we no longer 
know. The number of musicians and priests, of 
corporations, of emblems and banners, is quite 
bewildering. The God Amen himself came by 



1 86 Egypt 

water, on the river, in his golden barge with 
its raised prow, followed by the barques of all 
the other gods and goddesses of his heaven. The 
reddish stone, carved with minute care, tells me 
all this, as it has already told it to so many dead 
generations, so that I seem almost to see it. 

And now everybody has gone: the colonnades 
are empty and the noise of the dynamos has 
ceased. Midday approaches with its torpor. The 
whole temple seems to be ablaze with rays, and 
I watch the clear-cut shadows cast by this forest 
of stone gradually shortening on the ground. 
The sun, which just now shone, all smiles and 
gaiety, upon the quay of the new town amid the 
uproar of the stall-keepers, the donkey drivers 
and the cosmopolitan passengers, casts here a 
sullen, impassive and consuming fire. And mean- 
while the shadows shorten — and just as they do 
every day, beneath this sky which is never over- 
cast, just as they have done for five and thirty 
centuries, these columns, these friezes, and this 
temple itself, like a mysterious and solemn 
sundial, record patiently on the ground the 
slow passing of the hours. Verily for us, the 
ephemerae of thought, this unbroken continuity 
of the sun of Egypt has more of melancholy 
even than the changing, overcast skies of our 
climate. 

And now, at last, the temple is restored to 



Modern Luxor 187 

solitude and all noise in the neighbourhood has 
ceased. 

An avenue bordered by very high columns, of 
which the capitals are in the form of the full- 
blown flowers of the papyrus, leads me to a place 
shut in and almost terrible, where is massed an 
assembly of colossi. Two, who, if they were 
standing, would be quite ten yards in height, are 
seated on thrones on either side of the entrance. 
The others, ranged on the three sides of the 
courtyard, stand upright behind colonnades, but 
look as if they were about to issue thence and to 
stride rapidly towards me. Some, broken and 
battered, have lost their faces and preserve only 
their intimidating attitude. Those that remain 
intact — white faces beneath their Sphinx's head- 
gear — open their eyes wide and smile. 

This was formerly the principal entrance, and 
the office of these colossi was to welcome the 
multitudes. But now the gates of honour, flanked 
by obelisks of red granite, are obstructed by a 
litter of enormous ruins. And the courtyard has 
become a place voluntarily closed, where noth- 
ing of the outside world is any longer to be 
seen. In moments of silence, one can abstract 
oneself from all the neighbouring modern things, 
and forget the hour, the day, the century even, 
in the midst of these gigantic figures, whose 
smile disdains the flight of ages. The granites 



1 88 Egypt 

within which we are immured — and in such 
terrible company — shut out everything save the 
point of an old neighbouring minaret which shows 
now against the blue of the sky: a humble graft 
of Islam which grew here amongst the ruins 
some centuries ago, when the ruins themselves 
had already subsisted for three thousand years — 
a little mosque built on a mass of debris, which 
it now protects with its inviolability. How many 
treasures and relics and documents are hidden 
and guarded by this mosque of the peristyle! 
For none would dare to dig in the ground within 
its sacred walls. 

Gradually the silence of the temple becomes 
profound. And if the shortened shadows betray 
the hour of noon, there is nothing to tell to what 
millennium that hour belongs. The silences and 
middays like to this, which have passed before 
the eyes of these giants ambushed in their colon- 
nades — who could count them? 

High above us, lost in the incandescent blue, 
soar the birds of prey — and they were there in the 
times of the Pharaohs, displaying in the air iden- 
tical plumages, uttering the same cries. The 
beasts and plants, in the course of time, have 
varied less than men, and remain unchanged in 
the smallest details. 

Each of the colossi around me — standing there 
proudly with one leg advanced as if for a march, 



;1 



Modern Luxor 189 

heavy and sure, which nothing should withstand 
— grasps passionately in his clenched fist, at the 
end of the muscular arm, a kind of buckled cross, 
which in Egypt was the symbol of eternal life. 
And this is what the decision of their movement 
symbolises: confident all of them in this poor 
bauble which they hold in their hand, they cross 
with a triumphant step the threshold of death. 
..." Eternal Life " — the thought of immortal- 
ity — how the human soul has been obsessed by it, 
particularly in the periods marked by its greatest 
strivings ! The tame submission to the belief that 
the rottenness of the grave is the end of all is 
characteristic of ages of decadence and mediocrity. 
The three similar giants, little damaged in 
the course of their long existence, who align 
the eastern side of this courtyard strewn with 
blocks, represent, as indeed do all the others, that 
same Ramses II., whose efiigy was multiplied 
so extravagantly at Thebes and Memphis. But 
these three have preserved a powerful and im- 
petuous life. They might have been carved and 
polished yesterday. Between the monstrous 
reddish pillars, they look like white apparitions 
issuing from their embrasure of cokmins and 
advancing together like soldiers at manoeuvres. 
The sun at this moment falls perpendicularly on 
their heads and strange headgear, details their 
everlasting smile, and then sheds itself on their 



I90 Egypt 

shoulders and their naked torso, exaggerating^ 
their athletic muscles. Each holding in his hand 
the symbolical cross, the three giants rush for- 
ward with a formidable stride, heads raised, smil- 
ing, in a radiant march into eternity. 

Oh! this midday sun, that now pours down 
upon the white faces of these giants, and dis- 
places ever so slowly the shadows cast upon their 
breasts by their chins and Osiridean beards. To 
think how often in the midst of this same silence, 
this same ray has fallen thus, fallen from the 
same changeless sky, to occupy itself in this same 
tranquil play! Yes, I think that the fogs and 
rains of our winters, upon these stupendous ruins, 
would be less sad and less terrible than the calm 
of this eternal sunshine. 
• >..••• 

Suddenly a ridiculous noise begins to make 
the air tremble; the dynamos of the Agencies 
have been put in motion, and ladies in green 
spectacles arrive, a charming throng, with guide- 
books and cameras. The tourists, in short, are 
come out of their hotels, at the same hour as the 
flies awake. And the midday peace of Luxor 
has come to an end. 



A TWENTIETH - CENTURY 
EVENING AT THEBES 



CHAPTER XIV 

A TWENTIETH-CENTURY EVENING AT THEBES 

An impalpable dust floats in a sky which scarcely 
ever knows a cloud; a dust so impalpable that, 
even while it powders the heavens with gold, it 
leaves them their infinite transparency. It is a 
dust of remote ages, of things destroyed; a dust 
that is here continually — of which the gold at this 
moment fades to green at the zenith, but flames 
and glistens in the west, for it is now that magni- 
ficent hour which marks the end of the day's 
decline, and the still burning globe of the sun, 
quite low down in the heaven, begins to light up 
on all sides the conflagration of the evening. 

This setting sun illumines with splendour a 
silent chaos of granite, which is not that of the 
slipping of mountains, but that of ruins. And 
of such ruins as, to our eyes unaccustomed hered- 
itarily to proportions so gigantic, seem super- 
human. In places, huge masses of carven stone 
— pylons — ^still stand upright, rising like hills. 
Others are crumbling in all directions in bewilder- 
ing cataracts of stone. It is diflicult to conceive 
how these things, so massive that they might have 

193 



194 Egypt 

seemed eternal, could come to suffer such an utter 
ruin. Fragments of columns, fragments of 
obelisks, broken by downfalls of which the mere 
imagination is awful, heads and head-dresses of 
giant divinities, all lie higgledy-piggledy in a 
disorder beyond possible redress. Nowhere surely 
on our earth does the sun in his daily revolution 
east his light on such debris as this, on such a 
litter of vanished palaces and dead colossi. 

It was even here, seven or eight thousand 
years ago, under this pure crystal sky, that the 
first awakening of human thought began. Our 
Europe then was still sleeping, wrapped in the 
mantle of its damp forests; sleeping that sleep 
which still had thousands of years to run. Here, 
a precocious humanity, only recently emerged 
from the Age of Stone, that earliest form of all, 
an infant humanity, which saw massively on its 
issue from the massiveness of the original matter, 
conceived and built terrible sanctuaries for gods, 
at first dreadful and vague, such as its nascent 
reason allowed it to conceive them. Then the 
first megalithic blocks were erected; then began 
that mad heaping up and up, which was to last 
nearly fifty centuries; and temples were built 
above temples, palaces over palaces, each genera- 
tion striving to outdo its predecessor by a more 
titanic grandeur. 

Afterwards, four thousand years ago, Thebes 



Evening at Thebes 195 

was in the height of her glory, encumbered with 
gods and with magnificence, the focus of the 
hght of the world in the most ancient historic 
periods; while our Occident was still asleep and 
Greece and Assyria were scarcely awakened. 
Only in the extreme East, a humanity of a differ- 
ent race, the yellow people, called to follow in 
totally different ways, was fixing, so that they 
remain even to our day, the oblique lines of its 
angular roofs and the rictus of its monsters. 

The men of Thebes, if they still saw too 
massively and too vastly, at least saw straight; 
they saw calmly, at the same time as they saw 
for ever. Their conceptions, which had begun to 
inspire those of Greece, were afterwards in some 
measure to inspire our own. In religion, in art, 
in beauty under all its aspects, they were as 
much our ancestors as were the Aryans. 

Later again, sixteen hundred years before the 
birth of Christ, in one of the apogees of the town 
which, in the course of its interminable duration, 
experienced so many fluctuations, some ostenta- 
tious kings thought fit to build on this ground, 
already covered with temples, that which still 
remains the most arresting marvel of the ruins: 
the hypostyle hall, dedicated to the God Amen, 
with its forest of columns, as monstrous as the 
trunk of the baobab and as high as towers, com- 
pared with which the pillars of our cathedrals are 



196 Egypt 

utterly insignificant. In those days the same 
gods reigned at Thebes as three thousand years 
before, but in the interval they had been trans- 
formed little by little in accordance with the pro- 
gressive development of human thought, and 
Amen, the host of this prodigious hall, asserted 
himself more and more as the sovereign master 
of life and eternity. Pharaonic Egypt was really 
tending, in spite of some revolts, towards the no- 
tion of a divine unity ; even, one might say, to the 
notion of a supreme pity, for she already had her 
Apis, emanating from the AU-Powerful, bom of 
a virgin mother, and come humbly to the earth in 
order to make acquaintance with suffering. 

After Seti I. and the Ramses had built, in 
honour of Amen, this temple, which, beyond all 
doubt, is the grandest and most durable in the 
world, men still continued for another fifteen 
centuries to heap up in its neighbourhood those 
blocks of granite and marble and sandstone, 
whose enormity now amazes us. Even for the in- 
vaders of Egypt, the Greeks and Romans, this 
old ancestral town of towns remained imposing 
and unique. They repaired its ruins, and built 
here temple after temple, in a style which hardly 
ever changed. Even in the ages of decadence 
everything that raised itself from the old, sacred 
soil, seemed to be impregnated a little with the 
ancient grandeur. 



Evening at Thebes 197 

And it was only when the early Christians 
ruled here, and after them the Moslem icono- 
clasts, that the destruction became final. To these 
new believers, who, in their simplicity, imagined 
themselves to be possessed of the ultimate reli- 
gious formula, and to know by His right name 
the Great Unknowable, Thebes became the haunt 
of " false gods," the abomination of abomina- 
tions, which it behoved them to destroy. 

And so they set to work, penetrating with an 
ever-present fear into the profound depths of the 
gloomy sanctuaries, mutilating first of all the 
thousands of visages whose disconcerting smile 
frightened them, and then exhausting them- 
selves in the effort to uproot the colossi, which, 
even with the help of levers, they could not 
move. It was no easy task indeed, for every- 
thing was as solid as geological masses, as rocks 
or promontories. But for five or six hundred 
years the town was given over to the caprice of 
desecrators. 

And then came the centuries of silence and 
oblivion under the shroud of the desert sands, 
which, thickening each year, proceeded to bury, 
and, in the event, to preserve for us, this peerless 
relic. 

And now, at last, Thebes is being exhumed 
and restored to a semblance of life — now, after a 
cycle of seven or eight thousand years, when our 



198 Egypt 

Western humanity, having left the primitive gods 
that we see here, to embrace the Christian con- 
ception, which, even yesterday, made it Hve, is 
in way of denying everything, and struggles 
before the enigma of death in an obscurity more 
dismal and more fearful than in the commence- 
ment of the ages. (More dismal and more 
fearful still in this, that the plea of youth is 
gone.) From all parts of Europe curious and 
unquiet spirits, as well as mere idlers, turn their 
steps towards Thebes, the ancient mother. Men 
clear the rubbish from its remains, devise ways 
of retarding the enormous fallings of its ruins, 
and dig in its old soil, stored with hidden 
treasure. 

And this evening on one of the portals to 
which I have just mounted — that which opens 
at the north-west and terminates the colossal 
arterj^ of temples and palaces, many very diverse 
groups have already taken their places, after the 
pilgrimage of the day amongst the ruins. And 
others are hastening towards the staircase by 
which we have just climbed, so as not to miss 
the grand spectacle of the sun setting, always 
with the same serenity, the same unchanging 
magnificence, behind the town which once was 
consecrated to it. 

French, German, English: I see them below, 
a lot of pygmy figures, issuing from the hypo- 



Lvening at Ihebes 199 

style hall, and making their way towards us. 
Mean and pitiful they look in their twentieth- 
century travellers' costumes, hurrying along that 
avenue where once defiled so many processions of 
gods and goddesses. And yet this, perhaps, is 
the only occasion on which one of these bands of 
tourists does not seem to me altogether ridicu- 
lous. Amongst these groups of unknown people, 
there is none who is not collected and thoughtful, 
or who does not at least pretend to be so; and 
there is some saving quality of grace, even some 
grandeur of humility, in the sentiment which has 
brought them to this town of Amen, and in the 
homage of their silence. 

We are so high on this portal that we might 
fancy ourselves upon a tower, and the defaced 
stones of which it is built are immeasurably large. 
Instinctively each one sits with his face to the 
glowing sun, and consequently to the outspread 
distances of the fields and the desert. 

Before us, under our feet, an avenue stretches 
away, prolonging towards the fields the pomp of 
the dead city — an avenue bordered by monstrous 
rams, larger than buffaloes, all crouched on their 
pedestals in two parallel rows in the traditional 
hieratic pose. The avenue terminates beyond at 
a kind of wharf or landing-stage which formerly 
gave on to the Nile. It was there that the God 
Amen, carried and followed by long trains of 



200 Egypt 

priests, came every year to take his golden barge 
for a solemn procession. But it leads to-day only 
to the cornfields, for, in the course of successive 
centuries, the river has receded little by little and 
now winds its course a thousand yards away in 
the direction of Libya. 

We can see, beyond, the old sacred Nile be- 
tween the clusters of palm-trees on its banks; 
meandering there like a rosy pathway, which 
remains, nevertheless, in this hour of universal 
incandescence, astonishingly pale, and gleams oc- 
casionally with a bluish light. And on the farther 
bank, from one end to the other of the western 
horizon, stretches the chain of the Libyan moun- 
tains behind which the sun is about to plunge: a 
chain of red sandstone, parched since the begin- 
ning of the world — without a rival in the pres- 
ervation to perpetuity of dead bodies — which the 
Thebans perforated to its extreme depths to fill 
it with sarcophagi. 

We watch the sun descend. But we turn also 
to see, behind us, the ruins in this the traditional 
moment of their apotheosis. Thebes, the immense 
town-mummy, seems all at once to be ablaze — as 
if its old stones were able still to burn; all its 
blocks, fallen or upright, appear to have been 
suddenly made ruddy by the glow of fire. 

On this side, too, the view embraces great 
peaceful distances. Past the last pylons, and 



Evening at Thebes 201 

beyond the crumbling ramparts the country, 
down there behind the town, presents the same 
appearance as that we were facing* a moment 
before. The same cornfields, the same woods of 
date-trees, that make a girdle of green palms 
around the ruins. And, right in the background, 
a chain of mountains is lit up and glows with a 
vivid coral colour. It is the chain of the Arabian 
desert, lying parallel to that of Libya, along the 
whole length of the Nile Valley — which is thus 
guarded on right and left by stones and sand 
stretched out in profound solitudes. 

In all the surrounding country which we 
command from this spot there is no indication 
of the present day ; only here and there, amongst 
the palm-trees, the villages of the field labourers, 
whose houses of dried earth can scarcely have 
changed since the days of the Pharaohs. Our 
contemporary desecrators have up till now re- 
spected the infinite desuetude of the place, and, 
for the tourists who begin to haunt it, no one yet 
has dared to build a hotel. 

Slowly the sun descends; and behind us the 
granites of the town-mummy seem to bum more 
and more. It is true that a slight shadow of a 
warmer tint, an amaranth violet, begins to en- 
croach upon the lower parts, spreading along 
the avenues and over the open spaces. But 
everything that rises into the sky — the friezes 



202 Egypt 

of the temples, the capitals of the columns, 
the sharp points of the obelisks — are still red as 
glowing embers. These all become imbued with 
light and continue to glow and shed a rosy 
illumination until the end of the twilight. 

It is a glorious hour, even for the old dust of 
Egypt, which fills the air eternally, without 
detracting at all from its wonderful clearness. 
It savours of spices, of the Bedouin, of the 
bitumen of the sarcophagus. And here now it 
is playing the i^ole of those powders of different 
shades of gold which the Japanese use for the 
backgrounds of their lacquered landscapes. It 
reveals itself everj^where, close to and on the 
horizon, modifying at its pleasure the colour of 
things, and giving them a kind of metallic lustre. 
The phantasy of its changes is unimaginable. 
Even in the distances of the countryside, it is busy 
indicating by little trailing clouds of gold the 
smallest pathways traversed by the herds. 

And now the disc of the God of Thebes has 
disappeared behind the Libyan mountains, after 
changing its light from red to yellow and from 
yellow to green. 

And thereupon the tourists, judging that the 
display is over for the night, commence to descend 
and make ready for departure. Some in car- 
riages, others on donkeys, they go to recruit them- 
selves with the electricity and elegance of Luxor^ 



Evening at Thebes 203 

the neighbouring town (wines and spirits are 
paid for as extras, and we dress for dinner) . And 
the dust condescends to mark their exodus also by 
a last cloud of gold beneath the palm-trees of the 
road. 

An immediate solemnity succeeds to their de- 
parture. Above the mud houses of the fellah 
villages rise slender columns of smoke, which are 
of a periwinkle-blue in the midst of the still yellow 
atmosphere. They tell of the humble life of these 
little homesteads, subsisting here, where in the 
backward of the ages were so many palaces and 
splendours. 

And the first hayings of the watchdogs an- 
nounce already the vague uneasiness of the even- 
ings around the ruins. There is no one now within 
the mummy-town, which seems all at once to have 
grown larger in the silence. Very quickly the 
violet shadow covers it, all save the extreme points 
of its obelisks, which keep still a little of their 
rose-colour. The feeling comes over you that a 
sovereign mystery has taken possession of the 
town, as if some vague phantom things had just 
passed into it. 



THEBES BY NIGHT 



CHAPTER XV 

THEBES BY NIGHT 

The feeling, almost, that you have grown sud- 
denly smaller by entering there, that you are 
dwarfed to less than human size — ^to such an 
extent do the proportions of these ruins seem to 
crush you — and the illusion, also, that the light, 
instead of being extinguished with the evening, 
has only changed its colour, and become blue: 
that is what one experiences on a clear Egyptian 
night, in walking between the colonnades of the 
great temple at Thebes. 

The place is, moreover, so singular and so ter- 
rible that its mere name would at once cast a spell 
upon the spirit, even if one were ignorant of the 
place itself. The hypostyle of the temple of the 
God Amen — ^that could be no other thing but 
one. For this hall is unique in the world, in the 
same way as the Grotto of Fingal and the Hima- 
layas are unique. 
• . ' • • • • • 

To wander absolutely alone at night in Thebes 
requires during the winter a certain amount of 
stratagem and a knowledge of the routine of the 
207 



2o8 Egypt 

tourists. It is necessary, first of all, to choose a 
night on which the moon rises late and then, 
having entered before the close of the day, to 
escape the notice of the Bedouin guards who shut 
the gates at nightfall. Thus have I manoeuvred 
to-day, and undisturbed, watching from a hiding 
place on high, I have waited with the patience of 
a stone Osiris, till the grand transf oraiation scene 
of the setting of the sun was played out once 
more upon the iniins. Thebes, which, during the 
day, is almost animated by reason of the presence 
of the visitors and the gangs of fellahs who, sing- 
ing the while, are busy at the diggings and the 
clearing away of the rubbish, has emptied itself 
little by Httle, while the blue shadows were mount- 
ing from the base of the monstrous sanctuaries. 
I watched the people moving in a long row, like 
a trail of ants, towards the western gate between 
the pylons of the Ptolemies, and the last of them 
had disappeared before the rosy light died away 
on the topmost points of the obelisks. 

It seemed as if the silence and the night ar- 
rived together from beyond the Arabian desert, 
advanced together across the plain, spreading 
out like a rapid oil-stain; then gained the town 
from east to west, and rose rapidly from the 
ground to the very summits of the temples. 
And this march of the darkness was infinitely 
solemn. 



Thebes by Night 209 

For the first few moments, indeed, you might 
imagine that it was going to be an ordinary night 
such as we know in our chmate, and a sense of 
uneasiness takes hold of you in the midst of this 
confusion of enormous stones, which in the dark- 
ness would become a quite inextricable maze. 
Oh! the horror of being lost in these ruins of 
Thebes and not being able to see! But in the 
event the air preserved its transparency to such a 
degree, and the stars began soon to scintillate so 
brightly that the surrounding things could be 
distinguished almost as well as in the day- 
time. 

Indeed, now that the time of transition between 
the day and night has passed, the eyes grow ac- 
customed to the strange, blue, persistent clear- 
ness so that you seem suddenly to have acquired 
the pupils of a cat; and the ultimate effect is 
merely as if you saw through a smoked glass 
which changed all the various shades of this 
reddish-coloured country into one uniform tint 
of blue. 

Behold me then, for some two or three hours, 
alone among the temples of the Pharaohs. The 
tourists, whom the carriages and donkeys are at 
this moment taking back to the hotels of Luxor, 
will not return till very late, when the full moon 
will have risen and be shedding its clear light 
upon the ruins. My post, while I waited, was 



2IO Egypt 

high up among the ruins on the margin of the 
sacred Lake of Osiris, the still and enclosed water 
of which is astonishing in that it has remained 
there for so many centuries. It still conceals, 
no doubt, numberless treasures confided to it in 
the days of slaughters and pillages, when the 
armies of the Persian and Nubian kings forced 
the thick, surrounding walls. 

In a few minutes, thousands of stars appear at 
the bottom of this water, reflecting symmetrically 
the veritable ones which now scintillate every- 
where in the heavens. A sudden cold spreads 
over the town-mummy, whose stones, still warm 
from their exposure to the sun, cool very rapidly 
in this nocturnal blue which envelops them as in 
a shroud. I am free to wander where I please 
without risk of meeting anyone, and I begin to 
descend by the steps made by the falling of the 
granite blocks, which have formed on all sides 
staircases as if for giants. On the overturned 
surfaces, my hands encounter the deep, clear- 
cut hollows of the hieroglyphs, and sometimes 
of those inevitable people, carved in profile, who 
raise their arms, all of them, and make signs to 
one another. On arriving at the bottom I am 
received by a row of statues with battered faces, 
seated on thrones, and without hindrance of any 
kind, and recognising everything in the blue 
transparency which takes the place of day, I 



Thebes by Night 211 

come to the great avenue of the palaces of 
Amen. 

We have nothing on earth in the least degree 
comparable to this avenue, which passive multi- 
tudes took nearly three thousand years to con- 
struct, expending, century after century, their 
innumerable energies in carrying these stones, 
which our machines now could not move. And 
the objective was always the same: to prolong 
indefinitely the perspectives of pylons, colossi 
and obelisks, continuing always this same artery 
of temples and palaces in the direction of the 
old Nile — while the latter, on the contrary, 
receded slowly, from century to century, towards 
Libya. It is here, and especially at night, that 
you suffer the feeling of having been shrunken 
to the size of a pygmy. All round you rise mono- 
liths mighty as rocks. You have to take twenty 
paces to pass the base of a single one of them. 
They are placed quite close together, too close, 
it seems, in view of their enormity and mass. 
There is not enough air between them, and the 
closeness of their juxtaposition disconcerts you 
more, perhaps, even than their massiveness. 

The avenue which I have followed in an east- 
erly direction abuts on as disconcerting a chaos of 
granite as exists in Thebes — the hall of the feasts 
of Thothmes III. What kind of feasts were they, 
that this king gave here, in this forest of thick- 



212 Egypt 

set columns, beneath these ceilings, of which the 
smallest stone, if it fell, would crush twenty 
men? In places the friezes, the colonnades, which 
seem almost diaphanous in the air, are outlined 
still with a proud magnificence in unbroken 
alignment against the star-strewn sky. Elsewhere 
the destruction is bewildering; fragments of 
columns, entablatures, bas-reliefs lie about in 
indescribable confusion, like a lot of scattered 
wreckage after a world-wide tempest. For it 
was not enough that the hand of man should 
overturn these things. Tremblings of the earth, 
at different times, have also come to shake this 
Cyclops palace which threatened to be eternal. 
And all this — which represents such an excess of 
force, of movement, of impulsion, alike for its 
erection as for its overthrow — all this is tranquil 
this evening, oh! so tranquil, although toppling 
as if for an imminent downfall — tranquil for 
ever, one might say, congealed by the cold and 
by the night. 

I was prepared for silence in such a place, but 
not for the sounds which I commence to hear. 
First of all an osprey sounds the prelude, above 
my head and so close to me that it holds me 
trembling throughout its long cry. Then other 
voices answer from the depths of the ruins, voices 
very diverse, but all sinister. Some are only 
able to mew on two long-drawn notes: some 



Thebes by Night 213 

yelp like jackals round a cemetery, and others 
again imitate the sound of a steel spring slowly 
unwinding itself. And this concert comes always 
from above. Owls, ospreys, screech-owls, all the 
different kinds of birds, with hooked beaks and 
round eyes, and silken wings that enable them to 
fly noiselessly, have their homes amongst the 
granites massively upheld in the air; and they 
are celebrating now, each after its own fashion, 
the nocturnal festival. Intermittent calls break 
upon the air, and long-drawn infiinitely mournful 
wailings, that sometimes swell and sometimes 
seem to be strangled and end in a kind of sob. 
And then, in spite of the sonority of the vast 
straight walls, in spite of the echoes which pro- 
long the cries, the silence obstinately returns. 
Silence. The silence after all and beyond all 
doubt is the ti-ue master at this hour of this 
kingdom at once colossal, motionless and blue — 
a silence that seems to be infinite, because we 
know that there is nothing around these ruins, 
nothing but the line of the dead sands, the thres- 
hold of the deserts. 
• •••••• 

I retrace my steps towards the west in the 
direction of the hypostyle, traversing again the 
avenue of monstrous splendours, imprisoned and, 
as it were, dwarfed between the rows of sovereign 
stones. There are obelisks there, some upright. 



21+ Egypt 

some overthrown. One like those of Luxor, but 
much higher, remains intact and raises its sharp 
point into the sky; others, less well known in 
their exquisite simplicity, are quite plain and 
straight from base to summit, bearing only in 
relief gigantic lotus flowers, whose long climbing 
stems bloom above in the half light cast by the 
stars. The passage becomes narrower and more 
obscure, and it is necessary sometimes to grope 
my way. And then again my hands encounter 
the everlasting hieroglyphs carved everjnvhere, 
and sometimes the legs of a colossus seated on 
its throne. The stones are still slightly warm, 
so fierce has been the heat of the sun during the 
day. And certain of the granites, so hard that 
our steel chisels could not cut them, have kept 
their polish despite the lapse of centuries, and 
my fingers slip in touching them. 

There is now no sound. The music of the 
night birds has ceased. I listen in vain — so 
attentively that I can hear the beating of my 
heart. Not a sound, not even the buzzing of 
a fly. Everything is silent, everything is 
ghostly; and in spite of the persistent warmth 
of the stones the air grows colder and colder, 
and one gets the impression that everything 
here is frozen — definitively — as in the coldness 
of death. 

A vast silence reigns, a silence that has sub- 



Thebes by Night 215 

sisted for centuries, on this same spot, where 
formerly for three or four thousand years rose 
such an uproar of Uving men. To think of the 
clamorous multitudes who once assembled here, 
of their cries of triumph and anguish, of their 
dying agonies ! First of all the pantings of those 
thousands of harnessed workers, exhausting them- 
selves generation after generation, under the 
burning sun, in dragging and placing one above 
the other these stones, whose enormity now 
amazes us. And the prodigious feasts, the music 
of the long harps, the blares of the brazen trum- 
pets; the slaughters and battles when Thebes 
was the great and unique capital of the world, 
an object of fear and envy to the kings of the 
barbarian peoples who commenced to awake in 
neighbouring lands; the symphonies of siege 
and pillage, in days when men bellowed with 
the throats of beasts. To think of all this, here 
on this ground, on a night so calm and blue! 
And these same walls of granite from Syene, on 
which my puny hands now rest, to think of the 
beings who have touched them in passing, who 
have fallen by their side in. last sanguinaiy con- 
flicts, without rubbing even the polish from their 
changeless surfaces! 
• •••••• 

I now arrive at the hypostyle of the temple 
of Amen, and a sensation of fear makes me 



2i6 Egypt 

hesitate at first on the threshold. To find him- 
self in the dead of night before such a place 
might well make a man falter. It seems like 
some hall for Titans, a remnant of fabulous ages, 
which has maintained itself, during its long dura- 
tion, by force of its very massiveness, hke the 
mountains. Nothing human is so vast. No- 
where on earth have men conceived such dwell- 
ings. Columns after columns, higher and more 
massive than towers, follow one another so 
closely, in an excess of accumulation, that they 
produce a feeHng almost of suffocation. They 
mount into the clear sky and sustain there 
traverses of stone which you scarcely dare to 
contemplate. One hesitates to advance; a feel- 
ing comes over you that you are become in- 
finitesimally small and as easy to crush as an 
insect. The silence grows preternaturally sol- 
emn. The stars through all the gaps in the fear- 
ful ceilings seem to send their scintillations 
to you in an abyss. It is cold and clear and 
blue. 

The central bay of this hypostyle is in the 
same line as the road I have been following 
since I left the hall of Thothmes. It prolongs 
and magnifies as in an apotheosis that same long 
avenue, for the gods and kings, which was the 
glory of Thebes, and which in the succession of 
the ages nothing has contrived to equal. The 



Thebes by Night 217 

columns which border it are so gigantic ^ that 
their tops, formed of mysterious full-blown 
petals, high up above the ground on which we 
crawl, are completely bathed in the diffuse clear- 
ness of the sky. And enclosing this kind of 
nave on either side, like a terrible forest, is 
another mass of columns — monster columns, of 
an earlier style, of which the capitals close 
instead of opening, imitating the buds of some 
flower which will never blossom. Sixty to the 
right, sixty to the left, too close together for 
their size, they grow thick like a forest of 
baobabs that wanted space: they induce a feel- 
ing of oppression without possible deliverance, 
of massive and mournful eternity. 

And this, forsooth, was the place that I had 
wished to traverse alone, without even the 
Bedouin guard, who at night believes it his duty 
to follow the visitors. But now it grows lighter 
and lighter. Too light even, for a blue phosphor- 
escence, coming from the eastern horizon, begins 
to filter through the opacity of the colonnades 
on the right, outlines the monstrous shafts, and 
details them by vague glimmerings on their 
edges. The full moon is risen, alas ! and my hours 
of solitude are nearly over. 
• . • • • • • 

1 About thirty feet in circumference and seventy-five feet in 
height including the capital. 



2i8 Egypt 

The moon! Suddenly the stones of the 
summit, the copings, the formidable friezes, are 
lighted by rays of clear light, and here and there, 
on the bas-reliefs encirchng the pillars, appear 
luminous trails which reveal the gods and god- 
desses engraved in the stone. They were watch- 
ing in myriads around me, as I knew well, 
— coifed, all of them, in discs or great horns. 
They stare at one another with their arms raised, 
spreading out their long figures in an eager 
attempt at conversation. They are numberless, 
these eternally gesticulating gods. Wherever 
you look their forms are multiplied with a stupe- 
fying repetition. They seem to have some 
mysterious secret to convey to one another, but 
have perforce to remain silent, and for all the 
expressiveness of their attitudes their hands do 
not move. And hieroglyphs, too, repeated to 
infinity, envelop you on all sides hke a multiple 
woof of mystery. 
• •••••• 

Minute by minute now, everything amongst 
these rigid dead things grows more precise. Cold, 
hard rays penetrate through the immense ruin, 
separating with a sharp incisiveness the light 
from the shadows. The feeling that these 
stones, wearied as they were with their long 
duration, might still be thoughtful, still mindful 
of their past, grows less — less than it was a few 



Thebes by Night 219 

moments before, far less than during the pre- 
ceding blue phantasmagoria. Under this clear, 
pale light, as in the daytime under the fire 
of the sun, Thebes has lost for the moment 
whatever remained to it of soul; it has re- 
ceded farther into the backward of time, and 
appears now nothing more than a vast gigantic 
fossil that excites only our wonder and om' 
fear. 
• •••••• 

But the tourists will soon be here, attracted 
by the moon. A league away, in the hotels 
of Luxor, I can fancy how thej^ have hurried 
away from the tables, for fear of missing the 
celebrated spectacle. For me, therefore, it is 
time to beat a retreat, and, by the great avenue 
again, I direct my steps towards the pylons of 
the Ptolemies, where the night guards are 
waiting. 

They are busy already, these Bedouins, in 
opening the gates for some tourists, who have 
shown their permits, and who carry Kodaks, 
magnesium to light up the temples — quite an 
outfit in short. 

Farther on, when I have taken the road to 
Luxor, it is not long before I meet, under the 
palm-trees and on the sands, the crowd, the main 
body of the arrivals — some in carriages, some 
on horseback, some on donkeys. There is a 



2 20 Egypt 

noise of voices speaking all sorts of non-Egyptian^ 
languages. One is tempted to ask: "What is 
happening? A ball, a hohday, a grand mar- 
riage? " No. The moon is full to-night at 
Thebes, upon the ruins. That is all. 



THEBES IN SUNLIGHT 



CHAPTER XVI 

THEBES IN SUNLIGHT 

It is two o'clock in the afternoon. A white 
angry fire pours from the sky, which is pale from 
excess of light. A sun inimical to the men of 
our climate scorches the enormous fossil which, 
crumbling in places, is all that remains of Thebes 
and which lies there like the carcass of a gigantic 
beast that has been dead for thousands of years, 
but is too massive ever to be annihilated. 

In the hypostyle there is a little blue shade 
behind the monstrous pillars, but even that shade 
is dusty and hot. The columns too are hot, and 
so are all the blocks — and yet it is winter and 
the nights are cold, even to the point of frost. 
Heat and dust; a reddish dust, which hangs 
like an eternal cloud over these ruins of Upper 
Egypt, exhaling an odour of spices and mummy. 

The great heat seems to augment the retro- 
spective sensation of fatigue which seizes you as 
you regard these stones — ^too heavy for human 
strength — which are massed here in mountains. 
One almost seems to participate in the efforts, 
the exhaustions and the sweating toils of that 
people, with their muscles of brand new steel, 
223 



2 24 Egypt 

who in the carrying and piling of such masses 
had to bear the yoke for thirty centuries. 

Even the stones themselves tell of fatigue — 
the fatigue of being crushed by one another's 
weight for thousands of years ; the suffering that i 
comes of having been too exactly carved, and 
too nicely placed one above the other, so that 
they seem to be riveted together by the force of 
their mere weight. Oh! the poor stones of the 
base that bear the weight of these awful pilings! 

And the ardent colour of these things surprises 
you. It has persisted. On the red sandstone of 
the hypostyle, the paintings of more than three 
thousand years ago are still to be seen ; especially 
above the central chamber, almost in the sky, 
the capitals, in the form of great flowers, have 
kept the lapis blues, the greens and yellows 
with which their strange petals were long ago 
bespeckled. 

Decrepitude and crumbling and dust. In 
broad daylight, under the magnificent splendour 
of the life-giving sun, one realises clearly that all 
here is dead, and dead since days which the 
imagination is scarcely able to conceive. And 
the ruin appears utterly irreparable. Here and 
there are a few impotent and almost infantine 
attempts at reparation, undertaken in the ancient 
epochs of history by the Greeks and Romans. 
Columns have been put together, holes have been 



Thebes in Sunlight 225 

filled with cement. But the great blocks lie in 
confusion, and one feels, even to the point of 
despair, how impossible it is ever to restore to 
order such a chaos of ciTishing, overthrown things 
— even with the help of legions of workers and 
machines, and with centuries before you in which 
to complete the task. 

And then, what surprises and oppresses you 
is the want of clear space, the little room that 
remained for the multitudes in these halls which 
are nevertheless immense. The whole space 
between the walls was encumbered with pillars. 
The temples were half filled with colossal forests 
of stone. The men who built Thebes lived in the 
beginning of time, and had not yet discovered 
the thing which to us to-day seems so simple — 
namely, the vault. And yet they were marvel- 
lous pioneers, these architects. They had al- 
ready succeeded in evolving out of the dark, as 
it were, a number of conceptions which, from 
the beginning no doubt, slumbered in mysterious 
germ in the human brain — the idea of rectitude, 
the straight line, the right angle, the vertical 
line, of which Nature furnishes no example, even 
symmetry, which, if you consider it well, is less 
explicable still. They employed symmetry with 
a consummate mastery, understanding as well as 
we do all the effect that is to be obtained b}^ the 
repetition of like objects placed en pendant on 



226 Egypt 

either side of a portico or an avenue. But they 
did not invent the vault. And therefore, since 
there was a limit to the size of the stones which 
they were able to place flat like beams, they had 
recourse to this profusion of columns to support 
their stupendous ceilings. And thus it is that 
there seems to be a want of air, that one seems to 
stifle in the middle of their temples, dominated 
and obstructed as they are by the rigid presence 
of so many stones. And yet to-day you can see 
quite clearly in these temples, for, since the sus- 
pended rocks which served for roof have fallen, 
floods of light descend from all parts. But 
formerly, when a kind of half night reigned in 
the deep halls, beneath the immovable carapaces 
of sandstone or granite, how oppressive and 
sepulchral it must all have been — how final and 
pitiless, like a gigantic palace of Death ! On one 
day, however, in each year, here at Thebes, a light 
as of a conflagration used to penetrate from one 
end to the other of the sanctuaries of Amen; for 
the middle artery is open towards the north-west, 
and is aligned in such a fashion that, once a 
year, one solitary time, on the evening of the 
summer solstice, the sun as it sets is able to 
plunge its reddened raj'TS straight into the 
sanctuaries. At the moment when it enlarges 
its blood -coloured disc before descending be- 
hind the desolation of the Libyan mountains, 



ihebes in bunlight 227 

it arrives in the very axis of this avenue, of 
this suite of aisles, which measures more than 
800 yards in length. Formerly, then, on these 
evenings it shone horizontally beneath the ter- 
rible ceilings — between these rows of pillars which 
are as high as our Colonne Vendome — and threw, 
for some seconds, its colours of molten cop- 
per into the obscurity of the holy of holies. 
And then the whole temple would resound 
with the clashing of music, and the glory of the 
god of Thebes was celebrated in the depths of 
the forbidden halls. 
« . . • • • • 

Like a cloud, like a veil, the continual red- 
coloured dust floats everywhere above the ruins, 
and, athwart it, here and there, the sun traces 
long, white beams. But at one point of the 
avenue, behind the obelisks, it seems to rise • in 
clouds, this dust of Egypt, as if it were smoke. 
For the workers of bronze are assembled there 
to-day and, hour by hour, without ceasing, they 
dig in the sacred soil. Ridiculously small and 
almost negligible by the side of the great 
monoliths they dig and dig. Patiently they 
clear the ruins, and the earth goes away in little 
parcels in rows of baskets carried by children in 
the form of a chain. The periodical deposits of 
the Nile, and the sand carried by the wind of the 
desert, had raised the soil by about six yards 



22 8 Egypt 

since the time when Thebes ceased to live. But 
now men are endeavouring to restore the ancient 
level. At first sight the task seemed impossible, 
but they will achieve it in the end, even with 
their simple means, these fellah toilers, who sing 
as they labour at their incessant work of ants. 
Soon the grand hypostyle will be freed from 
rubbish, and its columns, which even before 
seemed so tremendous, uncovered now to the 
base, have added another twenty feet to their 
height. A number of colossal statues, which lay 
asleep beneath this shroud of earth and sand, 
have been brought back to the light, set upright 
again and have resumed their watch in the 
intimidating thoroughfares for a new period of 
quasi-eternity. Year by year the town-mummy 
is being slowly exhumed by dint of prodigious 
effort ; and is repeopled again by gods and kings 
who had been hidden for thousands of years ! ^ 
Year in, year out, the digging continues — deeper 
and deeper. It is scarcely known to what depth 
the debris and the ruins descend. Thebes had 
endured for so many centuries, the earth here is 
so penetrated with human past, that it is averred 
that, under the oldest of the known temples, 

^ As is generally known, the maintenance of the ancient 
monuments of Egypt and their restoration, so far as that may be 
possible, has been entrusted to the French. M. Maspero has 
delegated to Thebes an artist and a scholar, M. Legrain by 
name, who is devoting his life passionately to the work. 



Thebes in Sunlight 229 

there are still others, older still and more massive, 
of which there was no suspicion, and whose age 
must exceed eight thousand years. 

In spite of the burning sun, and of the clouds 
of dust raised by the blows of the pickaxes, one 
might linger for hours amongst the dust-stained, 
meagre fellahs, watching the excavations in this 
unique soil — where everything that is revealed 
is by way of being a surprise and a lucky find, 
where the least carved stone had a past of glory, 
formed part of the first architectural splendours, 
was a stone of Thebes, Scarcely a moment 
passes but, at the bottom of the trenches, as 
the digging proceeds, some new thing gleams. 
Perhaps it is the polished flank of a colossus, 
fashioned out of granite from Syene, or a little 
copper Osiris, the debris of a vase, a golden 
trinket beyond price, or even a simple blue 
pearl that has fallen from the necklace of some 
waiting-maid of a queen. 

This activity of the excavators, which alone 
reanimates certain quarters during the day, ends 
at sunset. Every evening the lean fellahs receive 
the daily wage of their labour, and take them- 
selves off to sleep in the silent neighbourhood in 
their huts of mud; and the iron gates are shut 
behind them. At night, except for the guards 
at the entrance, no one inhabits the ruins. 



230 Egypt 

Crumbling and dust. . . . Far around, on every 
side of these palaces and temples of the central 
artery — ^which are the best preser\^ed and re- 
main proudly upright — stretch great mournful 
spaces, on which the sun from morning till 
evening pours an implacable light. There, 
amongst the lank desert plants, lie blocks scat- 
tered at hazard — ^the remains of sanctuaries, of 
which neither the plan nor the form will ever 
be discovered. But on these stones, fragments 
of the historj^ of the world are still to be read 
in clear-cut hieroglyphs. 

To the west of the hypostyle hall there is a 
region strewn with discs, all equal and all alike. 
It might be a draught-board for Titans with 
draughts that would measure ten yards in cir- 
cumference. They are the scattered fragments, 
slices, as it were, of a colonnade of the Ramses. 
Farther on the ground seems to have passed 
through fire. You walk over blackish scorise en- 
crusted with brazen bolts and particles of melted 
glass. It is the quarter burnt by the soldiers of 
Cambyses. They were great destroyers of the 
queen city, were these same Persian soldiers. To 
break up the obelisks and the colossal statues they 
conceived the plan of scorching them by lighting 
bonfires around them, and then, when they saw 
them burning hot, they deluged them with cold 
water. And the granites cracked from top to base. 




Thebes in Sunlight 231 

It is well known, of course, that Thebes used 
to extend for a considerable distance both on 
this, the right, bank of the Nile, where the 
Pharaohs resided, and opposite, on the Libyan 
bank, given over to the preparers of mummies 
and to the mortuary temples. But to-day, ex- 
cept for the great palaces of the centre, it is 
little more than a litter of ruins, and the 
long avenues, lined with endless rows of sphinxes 
or rams, are lost, goodness knows where, buried 
beneath the sand. 

At wide intervals, however, in the midst of 
these cemeteries of things, a temple here and 
there remains upright, preserving still its sancti- 
fied gloom beneath its cavernous carapace. One, 
where certain celebrated oracles used to be 
delivered, is even more prisonlike and sepulchral 
than the others in its eternal shadow. High up 
in a wall the black hole of a kind of grotto 
opens, to which a secret corridor coming from 
the depths used to lead. It was there that the 
face of the priest charged with the announcement 
of the sibylline words appeared — and the ceiling 
of his niche is all covered still with the smoke 
from the flame of his lamp, which was extin- 
guished more than two thousand years ago ! 
• ••*••• 

What a number of ruins, scarcely emerging 
from the sand of the desert, are hereabout! 



2 32 Egypt 

And in the old dried-up soil, how many strange 
treasures remain hidden! When the sun lights 
thus the forlorn distances, when you perceive 
stretching away to the horizon these fields of 
death, you realise better what kind of a place 
this Thebes once was. Rebuilt as it were in the 
imagination it appears excessive, superabundant 
and multiple, hke those flowers of the antediluvian 
world which the fossils reveal to us. Compared 
with it how our modern towns are dwarfed, and 
our hasty little palaces, our stuccoes and old iron ! 

And it is so mystical, this town of Thebes, 
with its dark sanctuaries, once inhabited by gods 
and symbols. All the sublime, fresh-minded 
striving of the human soul after the Unknowable 
is as it were petrified in these ruins, in forms 
diverse and immeasurably grand. And subsist- 
ing thus down to our day it puts us to shame. 
Compared with this people, who thought only 
of eternity, we are a lot of pitiful dotards, who 
soon will be past caring about the wherefore 
of life, or thought, or death. Such beginnings 
presaged, surely, something greater than our 
humanity of the present day, given over to de- 
spair, to alcohol and to explosives! 
• •••••• 

Crumbling and dust! This same sun of 
Thebes is in its place each day, parching, ex- 
hausting, cracking and pulverising. 



Thebes in Sunlight 233 

On the ground where once stood so much 
magnificence there are fields of com, spread out 
like green carpets, which tell of the return of the 
humble life of tillage. Above all, there is the 
sand, encroaching now upon the very threshold 
of the Pharaohs ; there is the yellow desert ; there 
is the world of reflections and of silence, which 
approaches like a slow submerging tide. In the 
distance, where the mirage trembles from morn- 
ing till evening, the burying is already almost 
achieved. The few poor stones which still appear, 
barely emerging from the advancing dunes, are 
the remains of what men, in their superb revolts 
against death, had contrived to make the most 
massively indestructible. 

And this sun, this eternal sun, which parades 
over Thebes the irony of its duration — for us so 
impossible to calculate or to conceive! No- 
where so much as here does one suffer from the 
dismay of knowing that all our miserable little 
human effervescence is only a sort of fermenta- 
tion round an atom emanated from that sinister 
ball of fire, and that that fire itself, the wonder- 
ful sun, is no more than an ephemeral meteor, 
a furtive spark, thrown off during one of the in- 
numerable cosmic transformations, in the course 
of times without end and without beginning. 



»fH 



AN AUDIENCE OF 
AMENOPHIS 11. 



CHAPTER XVII 

AN AUDIENCE OF AMENOPHIS II. 

King Amenophis II. has resumed his receptions, 
which he found himself obhged to suspend for 
three thousand, three hundred and some odd 
years, by reason of his decease. They are very 
well attended; court dress is not insisted upon, 
and the Grand Master of Ceremonies is not above 
taking a tip. He holds them every morning in 
the winter from eight o'clock, in the bowels of a 
mountain in the desert of Libya; and if he rests 
himself during the remainder of the day it is 
only because, as soon as midday sounds, they turn 
off the electric light. 

Happy Amenophis! Out of so many kings 
who tried so hard to hide for ever their mummies 
in the depths of impenetrable caverns he is the 
only one who has been left in his tomb. And 
he " makes the most of it " every time he opens 
his funereal salons. 
• •••••• 

It is important to arrive before midday at the 
dwelling of this Pharaoh, and at eight o'clock 
sharp, therefore, on a clear February morning, I 
set out from Luxor, where for many days my 

237 



238 Egypt 

dahabiya had slumbered against the bank of the 
Nile. It is necessary first of all to cross the 
river, for the Theban kings of the Middle Empire 
all established their eternal habitations on the 
opposite bank — far beyond the plains of the 
river shore, right away in those momitains which 
bound the horizon as with a wall of adorable 
rose-colour. Other canoes, which are also cross- 
ing, glide by the side of mine on the tranquil 
water. The passengers seem to belong to that 
variety of Anglo-Saxons which is equipped 
by Thomas Cook & Son (Egypt Ltd.), and 
like me, no doubt, they are bound for the royal 
presence. 

We land on the sand of the opposite bank, 
which to-day is almost deserted. Formerly there 
stretched here a regular suburb of Thebes — 
that, namely, of the preparers of mummies, with 
thousands of ovens wherein to heat the natron 
and the oils, which preserv^ed the bodies from 
corruption. In this Thebes, where, for some fifty 
centuries, everything that died, whether man or 
beast, was minutely prepared and swathed in 
bandages, it will readily be understood what 
importance this quarter of the embahners came 
to assume. And it was to the neighbouring 
mountains that the products of so many careful 
wrappings were borne for burial, while the Nile 
carried away the blood from the bodies and the 



An Audience of Amenophis II. 239 

filth of their entrails. That chain of living rocks 
that rises before us, coloured each morning with 
the same rose, as of a tender flower, is literally 
stuffed with dead bodies. 

We have to cross a wide plain before reaching 
the mountains, and on our way cornfields alter- 
nate with stretches of sand already desertlike. 
Behind us extends the old Nile and the opposite 
bank which we have lately quitted — ^the bank of 
Luxor, whose gigantic Pharaonic colonnades are 
as it were lengthened below by their own re- 
flection in the mirror of the river. And in this 
radiant morning, in this pure light, it would be 
admirable, this eternal temple, with its image 
reversed in the depth of the blue water, were it 
not that at its sides, and to twice its height, rises 
the impudent Winter Palace, that monster hotel 
built last year for the fastidious tourists. And 
yet, who knows? The jackanapes who deposited 
this abomination on the sacred soil of Egypt 
perhaps imagines that he equals the merit of the 
artist who is now restoring the sanctuaries of 
Thebes, or even the glory of the Pharaohs who 
built them. 

As we draw nearer to the chain of Libya, 
where this king awaits us, we traverse fields still 
green with growing com — and sparrows and 
larks sing around us in the impetuous spring of 
this land of Thebes. 



240 Egypt 

And now beyond two menhirs, as it were, be- 
come gradually distinct. Of the same height 
and shape, alike indeed in every respect, they 
rise side by side in the clear distance in the 
midst of these green plains, which recall so well 
our fields of France. They wear the headgear 
of the Sphinx, and are gigantic human forms 
seated on thrones — the colossal statues of Mem- 
non. We recognise them at once, for the picture- 
makers of succeeding ages have popularised their 
aspect, as in the case of the pyramids. What is 
strange is that they should stand there so simply 
in the midst of these fields of growing corn, which 
reach to their very feet, and be surrounded by 
these humble birds we know so well, who sing 
without ceremony on their shoulders. 

They do not seem to be scandalised even at 
seeing now, passing quite close to them, the trucks 
of a playful little railway belonging to a local 
industry, that are laden with sugar-canes and 
gourds. 

The chain of Libya, during the last hour, has 
been growing gradually larger against the pro- 
found and excessively blue sky. And now that 
it rises up quite near to us, overheated, and as it 
were incandescent, under this ten o'clock sun, we 
begin to see on all sides, in front of the first rocky 
spurs of the mountains, the debris of palaces, col- 
onnades, staircases and pylons. Headless giants. 



THE COLOSSI OF MEMNON 



An Audience of Amenophis II. 24.1 

s^vathed like dead Pharaohs, stand upright, with 
hands crossed beneath their shroud of sandstone. 
They are the temples and statues for the manes of 
numberless kings and queens, who during three 
or four thousand years had their mummies buried 
hard by in the heart of the mountains, in the 
deepest of the walled and secret galleries. 

And now the cornfields have ceased ; there is no 
longer any herbage — nothing. We have crossed 
the desolate threshold, we are in the desert, and 
tread suddenly upon a disquieting funereal soil, 
half sand, half ashes, that is pitted on all 
sides with gaping holes. It looks like some region 
that had long been undermined by burrowing 
beasts. But it is men who, for more than fifty 
centuries, have vexed this ground, first to hide 
the mummies in it, and afterwards, and until our 
day, to exhume them. Each of these holes has 
enclosed its corpse, and if you peer within you 
may see yellow-coloured rags still trailing there; 
and bandages, or legs and vertebrae of thousands 
of years ago. Some lean Bedouins, who exercise 
the office of excavators, and sleep hard by in holes 
like jackals, advance to sell us scarabsei, blue- 
glass trinkets that are half fossilised, and feet or 
hands of the dead. 

And now farewell to the fresh morning. 
Every minute the heat becomes more oppres- 
sive. The pathway that is marked only by a 



242 Egypt 

row of stones turns at last and leads into the 
depths of the mountain by a tragical passage. 
We enter now into that " Valley of the Kings " 
which was the place of the last rendezvous of 
the most august mummies. The breaths of air 
that reach us between these rocks are become 
suddenly burning, and the site seems to belong 
no longer to earth but to some calcined planet 
which had for ever lost its clouds and atmo- 
sphere. This Libyan chain, in the distance so 
delicately rose, is positively frightful now that it 
overhangs us. It looks what it is — an enormous 
and fantastic tomb, a natural necropolis, whose 
vastness and horror nothing human could equal, 
an ideal stove for corpses that wanted to endure 
for ever. The limestone, on which for that 
matter no rain ever falls from the changeless 
sky, looks to be in one single piece from summit 
to base, and betrays no crack or crevice by which 
anything might penetrate into the sepulchres 
within. The dead could sleep, therefore, in the 
heart of these monstrous blocks as sheltered as 
under vaults of lead. And of what there is of 
magnificence the centuries have taken care. The 
continual passage of winds laden with dust has 
scaled and worn away the face of the rocks, so 
as to leave only the denser veins of stone, 
and thus have reappeared strange architectural 
fantasies such as Matter, in the beginning, might 



An Audience of Amenophis II. 24.3 

have dimly conceived. Subsequently the sun of 
Egypt has lavished on the whole its ardent red- 
dish patines. And now the mountains imitate in 
places great organ-pipes, badigeoned with yellow 
and carmine, and elsewhere huge bloodstained 
skeletons and masses of dead flesh. 

Outlined upon the excessive blue of the sky, 
the summits, illumined to the point of dazzling, 
rise up in the light — like red cinders of a glowing 
fire, splendours of living coal, against the pure 
indigo that turns almost to darkness. We seem 
to be walking in some valley of the Apocalypse 
with flaming walls. Silence and death, beneath 
a transcendent clearness, in the constant radiance 
of a kind of mournful apotheosis — it was such 
surroundings as these that the Egyptians chose 
for their necropoles. 

The pathway plunges deeper and deeper into 
the stifling defiles, and at the end of this " Valley 
of the Kings," under this sun now nearly merid- 
ian, which grows each minute more mournful 
and terrible, we expected to come upon a dread 
silence. But what is this? 

At a turning, beyond there, at the bottom of 
a sinister-looking recess, what does this crowd 
of people, what does this uproar mean? Is it a 
meeting, a fair? Under awnings to protect them 
from the sun stand some fifty donkeys, saddled 
in the English fashion. In a comer an electrical 



24+ Egypt 

workshop, built of new bricks, shoots forth its 
black smoke, and all about, between the high, 
blood-coloured walls, coming and going, making 
a great stir and gabbling to their hearts' content, 
are a number of Cook's tourists of both sexes, and 
some even who verily seem to have no sex at all. 
They are come for the royal audience; some on 
asses, some in jaunting cars, and some, the stout 
ladies who are grown short of wind, in chairs 
carried by the Bedouins. From the four points 
of Europe they have assembled in this desert 
ravine to see an old dried-up corpse at the bottom 
of a hole. 

Here and there the hidden palaces reveal their 
dark, square-shaped entrances, hewn in the 
massive rock, and over each a board indicates 
the name of a kingly mummy — Ramses IV., 
Seti I., Thothmes III., Ramses IX., etc. Al- 
though all these kings, except Amenophis II., 
have recently been removed and carried away to 
Lower Egypt, to people the glass cases of the 
museum of Cairo, their last dwellings have not 
ceased to attract crowds. From each imder- 
ground habitation are emerging now a number 
of perspiring Cooks and Cookesses. And from 
that of Amenophis, especially, they issue rapidly. 
Suppose that we have come too late and that the 
audience is over! 

And to think that these entrances had been 



An Audience of Amenophis II. 245 

walled up, had been masked with so much care, 
and lost for centuries! And of all the persever- 
ance that was needed to discover them, the ob- 
servation, the gropings, the soundings and ran- 
dom discoveries! 

But now they are being closed. We loitered 
too long around the colossi of Memnon and the 
palaces of the plain. It is nearly noon, a noon 
consuming and mournful, which falls perpendic- 
ularly upon the red summits, and is burning to 
its deepest recesses the valley of stone. 

At the door of Amenophis we have to cajole, 
beseech. By the help of a gratuity the Bedouin 
Grand Master of Ceremonies allows himself to be 
persuaded. We are to descend with him, but 
quickly, quickly, for the electric light will soon 
be extinguished. It will be a short audience, 
but at least it will be a private one. We shall 
be alone with the king. 

In the darkness, where at first, after so much 
sunlight, the little electric lamps seem to us scarcely 
more than glow-worms, we expected a certain 
amount of chilliness as in the undergrounds of oui* 
climate. But here there is only a more oppressive 
heat, stifling and withering, and we long to re- 
turn to the open air, which was burning indeed, 
but was at least the air of life. 

Hastily we descend: by steep staircases, by 
passages which slope so rapidly that they hurry 



246 Egypt 

us along of themselves, like slides; and it 
seems that we shall never ascend again, any 
more than the great mummy who passed here 
so long ago on his way to his eternal chamber. 
All this brings us, first of all, to a deep well — 
dug there to swallow up the desecrators in their 
passage — and it is on one of the sides of this 
oubhette, behind a casual stone carefully sealed, 
that the continuation of these funeral galleries 
was discovered. Then, when we have passed 
the well, b}^ a narrow bridge that has been thrown 
across it, the stairs begin again, and the steep 
passages that almost make you run; but now, 
by a sharp bend, they have changed their direc- 
tion. And still we descend, descend. Heavens! 
how deep down this king dwells! And at each 
step of our descent we feel more and more 
imprisoned under the sovereign mass of stone, 
in the centre of all this compact and silent 
thickness. 
• •••••• 

The little electric globes, placed apart like a 
garland, suffice now for our eyes which have 
forgotten the sun. And we can distinguish 
around us myriad figures inviting us to solemnity 
and silence. They are inscribed everywhere on 
the smooth, spotless walls of the colour of old 
ivory. They follow one another in regular order, 
repeating themselves obstinately in parallel rows, 



An Audience of Amenophis II. 247 

as if the better to impose upon our spirit, with 
gestures and symbols that are eternally the 
same. The gods and demons, the representa- 
tions of Anubis, with his black jackal's head and 
his long, erect ears, seem to make signs to us 
with their long arms and long fingers : " No 
noise! Look, there are mummies here!" The 
wonderful preservation of all this, the vivid 
colours, the clearness of the outlines, begin to 
cause a kind of stupor and bewilderment. Verily 
you would think that the painter of these figures 
of the shades had only just quitted the hypogeum. 
All this past seems to draw you to itself like an 
abyss to which you have approached too closely. 
It surrounds you, and little by little masters you. 
It is so much at home here that it has remained 
the present. Over and above the mere descent 
into the secret bowels of the rock there has been 
a kind of seizure with vertigo, which we had not 
anticipated and which has whirled us far away 
into the depths of the ages. 

These interminable, oppressive passages, by 
which we have crawled to the innermost depths 
of the mountain, lead at length to something 
vast, the walls divide, the vault expands and we 
are in the great funeral hall, of which the blue 
ceiling, all bestrewn with stars like the sky, is 
supported by six pillars hewn in the rock itself. 
On either side open other chambers into which 



24-8 Egypt 

the electricity permits us to see quite clearly, and 
opposite, at the end of the hall, a large crypt is 
revealed, which one divines instinctively must 
be the resting place of the Pharaoh. What a 
prodigious labour must have been entailed by 
this perforation of the living rock! And this 
hypogeum is not unique. All along the " Valley 
of the Kings " little insignificant doors — which 
to the initiated reveal the " Sign of the Shadow," 
inscribed on their lintels — lead to other subter- 
ranean places, just as sumptuous and perfidiously 
profound, with their snares, their hidden wells, 
their oubliettes and the bewildering multiplicity 
of their mural figures. And all these tombs this 
morning were full of people, and, if we had not 
had the good fortune to arrive after the usual 
hour, we should have met here, even in this 
dwelling of Amenophis, a battalion equipped by 
Messrs Cook. 

In this hall, with its blue ceihng, the frescoes 
multiply their riddles: scenes from the Book of 
Hades, all the funeral ritual translated into 
pictures. On the pillars and walls crowed the 
different demons that an Egyptian soul was 
likely to meet in its passage through the country 
of shadows, and underneath the passwords which 
were to be given to each of them are recapitu- 
lated so as not to be forgotten. 

For the soul used to depart simultaneously 



An Audience of Amenophis IL 249 

under the two forms of a flame ^ and a falcon ^ 
respectively. And this country of shadows, 
called also the west, to which it had to render 
itself, was that where the moon sinks and where 
each evening the sun goes down; a country to 
which the living were never able to attain, 
because it fled before them, however fast they 
might travel across the sands or over the waters. 
On its arrival there, the scared soul had to parley 
successively with the fearsome demons who lay 
in wait for it along its route. If at last it was 
judged worthy to approach Osiris, the great 
Dead Sun, it was subsumed in him and reap- 
peared, shining over the world the next morning 
and on all succeeding mornings until the con- 
summation of time — a vague survival in the 
solar splendour, a continuation without person- 
ality, of which one is scarcely able to say whether 
or not it was more desirable than eternal non- 
existence. 

And, moreover, it was necessary to preserve 
the body at whatever cost, for a certain double 
of the dead man continued to dwell in the dry 
flesh, and retained a kind of half life, barely 
conscious. Lying at the bottom of the sarcoph- 
agus it was able to see, b}^ virtue of those two 
eyes, which were painted on the lid, always in 

^ The Khou, which never returned to our world. 
2 The Bai, which might, at its will, revisit the tomb. 



2 50 Egypt 

the same axis as the empty eyes of the mmimiy. 
Sometimes, too, this double ^ escaping from the 
mummy and its box, used to wander like a 
phantom about the hypogeum. And, in order 
that at such times it might be able to obtain nour- 
ishment, a mass of mummified viands wrapped 
in bandages were amongst the thousand and 
one things buried at its side. Even natron and 
oils were left, so that it might re-embalm itself, 
if the worms came to life in its members. 

Oh! the persistence of this double^ sealed 
there in the tomb, a prey to anxiety lest corrup- 
tion should take hold of it ; which had to serve its 
long duration in suffocating darkness, in absolute 
silence, without anything to mark the days and 
nights, or the seasons or the centuries, or the 
tens of centuries without end! It was with such 
a terrible conception of death as this that each 
one in those days was absorbed in the preparation 
of his eternal chamber. 

And for Amenophis II. this more or less is 
what happened to his double. Unaccustomed 
to any kind of noise, after three or four hundred 
years passed in the company of certain familiars, 
lulled in the same heavy slumber as himself, he 
heard the sound of muffled blov/s in the distance, 
by the side of the hidden well. The secret 
entrance was discovered: men were breaking 
through its walls! Living beings were about to 



An Audience of Amenophis II. 251 

appear, pillagers of tombs, no doubt, come to 
unswathe them all ! But no ! Only some priests 
of Osiris, advancing with fear in a funeral 
procession. They brought nine great coffins con- 
taining the mummies of nine kings, his sons, 
grandsons and other unknown successors, down to 
that King Setnakht, who governed Egypt two 
and a half centuries after him. It was simply to 
hide them better that they brought them hither, 
and placed them all together in a chamber that 
was immediately walled up. Then they departed. 
The stones of the door were sealed afresh, and 
everything fell again into the old mournful and 
burning darkness. 

Slowly the centuries rolled on — perhaps ten, 
perhaps twenty — in a silence no longer even 
disturbed by the scratchings of the worms, long 
since dead. And a day came when, at the side 
of the entrance, the same blows were heard 
again. . . . And this time it was the robbers. 
Carrying torches in their hands, they rushed 
headlong in, with shouts and cries and, except in 
the safe hiding place of the nine coffins, every- 
thing was plimdered, the bandages torn off, the 
golden trinkets snatched from the necks of the 
mummies. Then, when they had sorted their 
booty, they walled up the entrance as before, and 
went their way, leaving an inextricable confusion 
of shrouds, of human bodies, of entrails issuing 



2 52 Egypt 

from shattered vases, of broken gods and em- 
blems. 

Afterwards, for long centuries, there was 
silence again, and finally, in our days, the double^ 
then in its last weakness and almost non-existent, 
perceived the same noise of stones being unsealed 
by blows of pickaxes. The third time, the living 
men who entered were of a race never seen 
before. At first they seemed respectful and 
pious, only touching things gently. But they 
came to plunder everything, even the nine 
cofiins in their still inviolate hiding place. They 
gathered the smallest fragments with a solicitude 
almost religious. That they might lose nothing 
they even sifted the rubbish and the dust. But, 
as for Amenophis, who was already nothing 
more than a lamentable mummy, without jewels 
or bandages, they left him at the bottom of his 
sarcophagus of sandstone. And since that day, 
doomed to receive each morning numerous peo- 
ple of a strange aspect, he dwells alone in his 
hypogeum, where there is now neither a being 
nor a thing belonging to his time. 

But yes, there is! We had not looked all 
round. There in one of the lateral chambers 
some bodies are lying, dead bodies — ^three corpses 
(unswathed at the time of the pillage), side by 
side on their rags. First, a woman, the queen 
probably, with loosened hair. Her profile has 



An Audience of Amenophis II. 253 

preserved its exquisite lines. How beautiful she 
still is! And then a young boy with the little 
greyish face of a doll. His head is shaved, ex- 
cept for that long curl at the right side, which 
denotes a prince of the royal blood. And the 
third a man. Ugh! how terrible he is — ^looking 
as if he found death a thing irresistibly comical. 
He even writhes with laughter, and eats a corner 
of his shroud as if to prevent himself from burst- 
ing into a too unseemly mirth. 

And then, suddenly, black night! And we 
stand as if congealed in our place. The electric 
light has gone out — everywhere at once. Above, 
on the earth, midday must have sounded — for 
those who still have cognisance of the sun and 
the hours. 

The guard who has brought us hither shouts 
in his Bedouin falsetto, in order to get the light 
switched on again, but the infinite thickness of 
the walls, instead of prolonging the vibrations, 
seems to deaden them; and besides, who could 
hear us, in the depths where we now are? Then, 
groping in the absolute darkness, he makes his 
way up the sloping passage. The hurried patter 
of his sandals and the flapping of his burnous 
grow faint in the distance, and the cries that he 
continues to utter sound so smothered to us soon 
that we might ourselves be buried. And mean- 
while we do not move. But how comes it that it 



2 5+ Egypt 

is so hot amongst these mummies? It seems as 
if there were fires burning in some oven close by. 
And above all there is a want of air. Perhaps 
the corridors, after our passage, have con- 
tracted, as happens sometimes in the anguish 
of dreams. Perhaps the long fissure by which 
we have crawled hither, perhaps it has closed in 
upon us. . . . 

But at length the cries of alarm are heard and 
the light is turned on again. The three corpses 
have not profited by the unguarded moments to 
attempt any aggressive movement. Their posi- 
tions, their expressions have not changed: the 
queen calm and beautiful as ever ; the man eating 
still the corner of his rags to stifle that mad 
laughter of thirty-three centuries. 

The Bedouin has now returned, breathless 
from his journey. He urges us to come to see 
the king before the electric light is again extin- 
guished, and this time for good and all. Behold 
us now at the end of the hall, on the edge of 
a dark crypt, leaning over and peering within. 
It is a place oval in form, with a vault of a 
funereal black, relieved by frescoes, either white 
or of the colour of ashes. They represent, these 
frescoes, a whole new register of gods and 
demons, some slim and sheathed narrowly like 
mummies, others with big heads and big bellies 
like hippopotami. Placed on the ground and 



An Audience of Amenophis II. 255 

watched from above by all these figures is an 
enormous sarcophagus of stone, wide open; and 
in it we can distinguish vaguely the outline of a 
human body : the Pharaoh ! 

At least we should have liked to see him 
better. The necessary light is forthcoming at 
once: the Bedouin Grand Master of Ceremonies 
touches an electric button and a powerful lamp 
illumines the face of Amenophis, detailing with 
a clearness that almost frightens you the closed 
eyes, the grimacing countenance, and the 
whole of the sad mummy. This theatrical ef- 
fect took us by surprise; we were not prepared 
for it. 

He was buried in magnificence, but the pil- 
lagers have stripped him of everything, even of 
his beautiful breastplate of tortoiseshell, which 
came to him from a far-off Oriental country, and 
for many centuries now he has slept half naked 
on his rags. But his poor bouquet is there still 
— of mimosa, recognisable even now, and who 
will ever tell what pious or perhaps amorous hand 
it was that gathered these flowers for him, more 
than three thousand years ago. 

The heat is suffocating. The whole crushing 
mass of this mountain, of this block of hmestone, 
into which we have crawled through relatively 
imperceptible holes, like white ants or larvae, 
seems to weigh upon our chest. And these 



256 Egypt 

figures too, inscribed on every side, and this 
mystery of the hieroglyphs and the symbols, 
cause a growing uneasiness. You are too near 
them, they seem too much the masters of the 
exits, these gods with their heads of falcon, ibis 
and jackal, who, on the walls, converse in a con- 
tinual exalted pantomime. And then the feeling 
comes over you, that you are guilty of sacrilege 
standing there, before this open coffin, in this un- 
wonted insolent light. The dolorous, blackish 
face, half eaten away, seems to ask for mercy: 
" Yes, yes, my sepulchre has been violated and 
I am returning to dust. But now that you have 
seen me, leave me, turn out that light, have 
pity on my nothingness." 

In sooth, what a mockery! To have taken 
so many pains, to have adopted so many strata- 
gems to hide his corpse; to have exhausted 
thousands of men in the hewing of this under- 
ground labyrinth, and to end thus, with his head 
in the glare of an electric lamp, to amuse 
whoever passes. 

And out of pity — I think it was the poor 
bouquet of mimosa that awakened it — I say to 
the Bedouin: "Yes, put out the light, put it 
out — that is enough." 

And then the darkness returns above the royal 
countenance, which is suddenly effaced in the 
sarcophagus. The phantom of the Pharaoh is 



An Audience of Amenophis II. 257 

vanished, as if replunged into the unfathomable 
past. The audience is over. 

And we, who are able to escape from the horror 
of the hypogeum, reascend rapidly towards the 
sunshine of the living, we go to breathe the 
air again, the air to which we have still a right 
— for some few days longer. 



AT THEBES IN THE TEMPLE 
OF THE OGRESS 



CHAPTER XVIII 

AT THEBES IN THE TEMPLE OF THE OGRESS 

This evening, in the vast chaos of ruins — at the 
hour in which the hght of the sun begins to turn 
to rose — I make my way along one of the magnif- 
icent roads of the town-mummy, that, in fact, 
which goes off at a right angle to the line of the 
temples of Amen, and, losing itself more or less 
in the sands, leads at length to a sacred lake on 
the border of which certain cat-headed goddesses 
are seated in state watching the dead water and 
the expanse of the desert. This particular road 
was begun three thousand four hundred years 
ago by a beautiful queen called Makeri,^ and in 
the following centuries a number of kings con- 
tinued its construction. It was ornamented with 
pylons of a superb massiveness — pylons are mon- 
umental walls, in the form of a trapezium with a 
wide base, covered entirely with hieroglyphs, 
which the Egyptians used to place at either side 
of their porticoes and long avenues — as well as 
by colossal statues and interminable rows of rams, 
larger than buffaloes, crouched on pedestals. 

1 To-day the mummy with the baby in the museum at Cairo. 
261 



262 Egypt 

At the first pylons I have to make a detour. 
They are so ruinous that their blocks, fallen 
down on all sides, have closed the passage. Here 
used to watch, on right and left, two upright 
giants of red granite from Syene. Long ago, 
in times no longer precisely known, they were 
broken off, both of them, at the height of the 
loins. But their muscular legs have kept their 
proud, marching attitude, and each in one of the 
armless hands, which reach to the end of the 
cloth that girds their loins, clenches passionately 
the emblem of eternal life. And this Syenite 
granite is so hard that time has not altered it in 
the least; in the midst of the confusion of stones 
the thighs of these mutilated giants gleam as if 
they had been polished yesterday. 

Farther on we come upon the second pylons, 
foundered also, before which stands a row of 
Pharaohs. 

On every side the overthrown blocks display 
their utter confusion of gigantic things in the 
midst of the sand which continues patiently to 
bury them. And here now are the third pylons, 
flanked by their two marching giants, who have 
neither head nor shoulders. And the road, 
marked majestically still by the debris, continues 
to lead towards the desert. 

And then the fourth and last pylons, which 
seem at first sight to mark the extremity of the 



In the Temple of the Ogress 263 

ruins, the beginning of the desert nothingness. 
Time-worn and uncrowned, but stiff and upright 
still, they seem to be set there so solidly that 
nothing could ever overthrow them. The two 
colossal statues which guard them on the right 
and left are seated on thrones. One, that on the 
eastern side, has almost disappeared. But the 
other stands out entire and white, with the white- 
ness of marble, against the brown-coloured back- 
ground of the enormous stretch of wall covered 
with hieroglyphs. His face alone has been muti- 
lated; and he preserves still his imperious chin, 
his ears, his Sphinx's headgear, one might al- 
most say his meditative expression, before this 
deployment of the vast solitude which seems to 
begin at his very feet. 

Here however was only the boundary of the 
quarters of the God Amen. The boundary of 
Thebes was much farther on, and the avenue 
which will lead me directly to the home of the 
cat-headed goddesses extends farther still to the 
old gates of the town; albeit you can scarcely 
distinguish it between the double row of Krio- 
sphinxes all broken and well-nigh buried. 

The day falls, and the dust of Egypt, in ac- 
cordance with its invariable practice every even- 
ing, begins to resemble in the distance a powder 
of gold. I look behind me from time to time 
at the giant who watches me, seated at the foot 



264 Egypt 

of his pylon on which the history of a Pharaoh 
is carved in one immense picture. Above him 
and above his wall, which grows each minute 
more rose-coloured, I see, gradually mounting in 
proportion as I move away from it, the great 
mass of the palaces of the centre, the hypostyle 
hall, the halls of Thothmes and the obelisks, 
all the entangled cluster of those things at once 
so grand and so dead, which have never been 
equalled on earth. 

And as I continue to gaze upon the ruins, 
resplendent now in the rosy apotheosis of the 
evening, they come to look like the crumbling 
remains of a gigantic skeleton. They seem to 
be begging for a merciful surcease, as if they 
were tired of this endless gala colouring at each 
setting of the sun, which mocks them with its 
eternity. 

All this is now a long way behind me; but 
the air is so limpid, the outlines remain so 
clear that the illusion is rather that the temples 
and the pylons grow smaller, lower themselves 
and sink into the earth. The white giant who 
follows me always with his sightless stare is now 
reduced to the proportions of a simple human 
dreamer. His attitude moreover has not the 
rigid hieratic aspect of the other Theban statues. 
With his hands upon his knees he looks like 
a mere ordinary mortal who had stopped to 



In the Temple of the Ogress 265 

reflect/ I have known him for many days — for 
many days and many nights, for, what with his 
whiteness and the transparency of these Egyptian 
nights, I have seen him often outhned in the dis- 
tance under the dim hght of the stars — a great 
phantom in his contemplative pose. And I feel 
myself obsessed now by the continuance of his 
attitude at this entrance of the ruins — I who shall 
pass without a morrow from Thebes and even 
from the earth— even as we all pass. Before con- 
scious life was vouchsafed to me he was there, had 
been there since times which make you shudder 
to think upon. For three and thirty centuries, 
or thereabouts, the eyes of myriads of unknown 
men and women, who have gone before me, saw 
him just as I see him now, tranquil and white, in 
this same place, seated before this same threshold, 
with his head a little bent, and his pervaaing air 
of thought. 

I make my way without hastening, having 
always a tendency to stop and look behind 
me, to watch the silent heap of palaces and the 
white dreamer, which now are all illumined 
with a last Bengal fire in the daily setting of 
the sun. 

And the hour is already twilight when I reach 
the goddesses. 

Their domain is so destroyed that the sands 

^ Statue of Amenophis III. 



266 Egypt 

had succeeded in covering and hiding* it for cen- 
turies. But it has lately been exhumed. 

There remain of it now only some fragments 
of columns, aligned in multiple rows in a vast 
extent of desert. Broken and fallen stones and 
debris.^ I walk on without stopping, and at 
length reach the sacred lake on the margin of 
which the great cats are seated in eternal council, 
each one on her throne. The lake, dug by order 
of the Pharaohs, is in the form of an arc, like 
a kind of crescent. Some marsh birds, that are 
about to retire for the night, now traverse its 
mournful, sleeping water. Its borders, which 
have known the utmost of magnificence, are be- 
come mere heaps of ruins on which nothing grows. 
And what one sees beyond, what the attentive 
goddesses themselves regard, is the empty deso- 
late plain, on which some few poor fields of corn 
mingle in this twihght hour with the sad infini- 
tude of the sands. And the whole is bounded on 
the horizon by the chain, still a little rose-coloured, 
of the limestones of Arabia. 

They are there, the cats, or, to speak more 
exactly, the lionesses, for cats would not have 
those short ears, or those cruel chins, thickened 
by tufts of beard. All of black granite, images 
of Sekhet (who was the Goddess of War, and in 
her hours the Goddess of Lust), they have the 

1 The temple of the Goddess Mut. 



In the Temple of the Ogress 267 

slender body of a woman, which makes more ter- 
rible the great feline head surmounted by its high 
bonnet. Eight or ten, or perhaps more, they 
are more disquieting in that they are so numerous 
and so alike. They are not gigantic, as one might 
have expected, but of ordinary human stature 
— easy therefore to carry away, or to destroy, 
and that again, if one reflects, augments the 
singular impression they cause. When so many 
colossal figures lie in pieces on the ground, how 
comes it that they, little people seated so tran- 
quilly on their chairs, have contrived to remain 
intact, during the passing of the three and thirty 
centuries of the world's history? 

The passage of the marsh birds, which for a 
moment disturbed the clear mirror of the lake, 
has ceased. Around the goddesses nothing moves 
and the customary infinite silence envelops them 
as at the fall of every night. They dwell indeed 
in such a forlorn comer of the ruins! Who, to 
be sure, even in broad dayhght, would think of 
visiting them? 

Down there in the west a trailing cloud of 
dust indicates the departure of the tourists, 
who had flocked to the temple of Amen, and now 
hasten back to Luxor, to dine at the various 
tables d'hote. The ground here is so felted with 
sand that in the distance we cannot hear the roll- 
ing of their carriages. But the knowledge that 



268 Egypt 

they are gone renders more intimate the inter- 
view with these numerous and identical goddesses, 
who httle by httle have been draped in shadow. 
Their seats turn their backs to the palaces of 
Thebes, which now begin to be bathed in violet 
waves and seem to sink towards the horizon, to 
lose each minute something of their importance 
before the sovereignty of the night. 

And the black goddesses, with their lioness' 
heads and tall headgear — seated there with their 
hands upon their knees, with eyes fixed since the 
beginning of the ages, and a disturbing smile on 
their thick lips, like those of a wild beast — con- 
tinue to regard — beyond the little dead lake — 
that desert, which now is only a confused im- 
mensity, of a bluish ashy-grey. And the fancy 
seizes you that they are possessed of a kind of 
life, which has come to them after long waiting, 
by virtue of that expression which they have worn 
on their faces so long, oh! so long. 
• ••*••• 

Beyond, at the other extremity of the ruins, 
there is a sister of these goddesses, taller than 
they, a great Sekhet, whom in these parts men 
call the Ogress, and who dwells alone and up- 
right, ambushed in a narrow temple. Amongst 
the fellahs and the Bedouins of the neighbour- 
hood she enjoys a very bad reputation, it being 
her custom of nights to issue from her temple, 



In the Temple of the Ogress 269 

and devoui' men; and none of them would will- 
ingly venture near her dwelling at this late hour. 
But instead of returning to Luxor, like the good 
people whose carriages have just departed, I 
rather choose to pay her a visit. 

Her dwelling is some distance away, and I 
shall not reach it till the dead of night. 

First of all I have to retrace my steps, to 
return along the whole avenue of rams, to pass 
again by the feet of the white giant, who has 
already assumed his phantomlike appearance, 
while the violet waves that bathed the town- 
mummy thicken and turn to a greyish-blue. 
And then, leaving behind me the pylons guarded 
by the broken giants, I thread my way among 
the palaces of the centre. 

It is among these palaces that I encounter for 
good and all the night, with the first cries of the 
owls and ospreys. It is still warm there, on 
account of the heat stored by the stones during 
the day, but one feels nevertheless that the air is 
freezing. 

At a crossing a tall human figure looms up, 
draped in black and armed with a baton. It is 
a roving Bedouin, one of the guards, and this 
more or less is the dialogue exchanged between 
us (freely and succinctly translated) : 

" Your permit, sir." 

" Here it is." 



270 Egypt 

(Here we combine our efforts to illuminate the 
said permit by the light of a match.) 

" Good, I will go with you." 

"No. I beg of you." 

" Yes ; I had better. Where are you go- 
ing? " 

" Beyond, to the temple of that lady — you 
know, who is great and powerful and has a face 
like a lioness." 

" Ah ! . . . Yes, I think I understand that you 
would prefer to go alone." (Here the intonation 
becomes infantine. ) " But you are a kind gentle- 
man and will not forget the poor Bedouin all 
the same." 

He goes his way. On leaving the palaces I 
have still to traverse an extent of uncultivated 
country, where a veritable cold seizes me. Above 
my head no longer the heavy suspended stones, 
but the far-off expanse of the blue night sky — 
where are shining now myriads upon myriads of 
stars. For the Thebans of old this beautiful 
vault, scintillating always with its powder of 
diamonds, shed no doubt only serenity upon their 
souls. But for us, "who know, alas! it is on the 
contrary the field of the great fear, which, out 
of pity, it would have been better if we had 
never been able to see ; the incommensurable black 
void, where the worlds in their frenzied whirling 
precipitate themselves hke rain, crash into and 



In the Temple of the Ogress 271 

annihilate one another, only to be renewed for 
fresh eternities. 

All this is seen too vividly, the horror of it be- 
comes intolerable, on a clear night like this, in 
a place so silent and littered so with ruins. More 
and more the cold penetrates you — ^the mournful 
cold of the sidereal spheres from which nothing 
now seems to protect you, so rarefied — almost 
non-existent — does the limpid atmosphere ap- 
pear. And the gravel, the poor dried herbs, that 
crackle under foot, give the illusion of the crunch- 
ing noise we know at home on winter nights when 
the frost is on the ground. 

I approach at length the temple of the Ogress. 
These stones which now appear, whitish in 
the night, this secret -looking dwelling near the 
boundary wall of Thebes, proclaim the spot, and 
verily at such an hour as this it has an evil 
aspect. Ptolemaic columns, little vestibules, lit- 
tle courtyards where a dim blue light enables 
you to find your way. Nothing moves; not 
even the flight of a night bird: an absolute 
silence, magnified awfully by the presence of the 
desert which you feel encompasses you beyond 
these walls. And beyond, at the bottom, three 
chambers made of massive stone, each with its 
separate entrance. I know that the first two are 
empty. It is in the third that the Ogress dwells, 
unless, indeed, she have already set out upon her 



272 Egypt 

nocturnal hunt for human flesh. Pitch darkness 
reigns within and I have to grope my way. 
Quickly I light a match. Yes, there she is 
indeed, alone and upright, almost part of the end 
wall, on which my httle light makes the horrible 
shadow of her head dance. The match goes out 
— irreverently I light many more under her chin, 
under that heavy, man-eating jaw. In very 
sooth, she is terrifying. Of black granite — like 
her sisters, seated on the margin of the mournful 
lake — but much taller than they, from six to eight 
feet in height, she has a woman's body, ex- 
quisitely slim and young, with the breasts of a 
virgin. Very chaste in attitude, she holds in 
her hand a long-stemmed lotus flower, but by a 
contrast that nonplusses and paralyses you the 
delicate shoulders support the monstrosity of a 
huge lioness' head. The lappets of her bonnet 
fall on either side of her ears almost down to her 
breast, and surmounting the bonnet, by way of 
addition to the mysterious pomp, is a large moon 
disc. Her dead stare gives to the ferocity of her 
visage something unreasoning and fatal; an ir- 
responsible ogress, without pity as without pleas- 
ure, devouring after the manner of Nature and of 
Time. And it was so perhaps that she was 
understood by the initiated of ancient Egypt, who 
symbolised everything for the people in the fig- 
ures of gods. 



In the Temple of the Ogress 273 

In the dark retreat, enclosed with defaced 
stones, in the little temple where she stands, 
alone, upright and grand, with her enormous 
head and thrust-out chin and tall goddess' head- 
dress — one is necessarily quite close to her. In 
touching her, at night, you are astonished to find 
that she is less cold than the air; she becomes 
somebody, and the intolerable dead stare seems 
to weigh you down. 

During the tete-a-tete, one thinks involuntarily 
of the surroundings, of these ruins in the desert, 
of the prevailing nothingness, of the cold beneath 
the stars. And, now, that summation of doubt 
and despair and terror, which such an assemblage 
of things inspires in you, is confirmed, if one may 
say so, by the meeting with this divinity-symbol, 
which awaits you at the end of the journey, to 
receive ironically all human prayer ; a rigid horror 
of granite, with an implacable smile and a devour- 
ing jaw. 



A TOWN PROMPTLY 
EMBELLISHED 



CHAPTER XIX 

A TOWN PROMPTLY EMBELLISHED 

Eight years and a line of railway have sufficed 
to accomplish its metamorphosis. Once in Up- 
per Egypt, on the borders of Nubia, there was 
a little humble town, rarely visited, and want- 
ing, it must be owned, in elegance and even 
in comfort. 

Not that it was without picturesqueness and 
historical interest. Quite the contrary. The 
Nile, charged with the waters of equatorial 
Africa, flung itself close by from the height of a 
mass of black granite, in a majestic cataract; 
and then, before the little Arab houses, became 
suddenly calm again, and flowed between islets 
of fresh verdure where clusters of palm-trees 
swayed their plumes in the wind. 

And around were a number of temples, of 
hypogea, of Roman ruins, of ruins of churches 
dating from the first centuries of Christianity. 
The ground was full of souvenirs of the great 
primitive civilisations. For the place, abandoned 
for ages and lulled in the folds of Islam under 
the guardianship of its white mosque, was once 
one of the centres of the life of the world. 
277 



278 Egypt 

And, moreover, in the adjoining desert, some 
three or four thousand years ago, the ancient 
history of the world had been written by the 
Pharaohs in immortal hieroglyphics — well-nigh 
everywhere, on the polished sides of the strange 
blocks of blue and red granite that lie scattered 
about the sands and look now like the forms of 
antediluvian monsters. 
• • • • • • • 

Yes, but it was necessary that all this should 
be co-ordinated, focused as it were, and above 
all rendered accessible to the delicate travellers 
of the Agencies. And to-day we have the pleas- 
ure of announcing that, from December to 
March, Assouan (for that is the name of the 
fortunate locahty) has a " season " as fashionable 
as those of Ostend or Spa. 

In approaching it, the huge hotels erected on 
all sides — even on the islets of the old river — 
charm the eye of the traveller, greeting him with 
their welcoming signs, which can be seen a league 
away. True, they have been somewhat hastily 
constructed, of mud and plaster, but they recall 
none the less those gracious palaces with which 
the Compagnie des Wagon-Lits has dowered the 
world. And how negligible now, how dwarfed 
by the height of their facades, is the poor little 
town of olden times, with its little houses, 
whitened with chalk, and its baby minaret. 



THE CATARACT AT ASSOUAN 



A Town Promptly Embellished 279 

The cataract, on the other hand, has disap- 
peared from Assouan. The tutelary Albion wisely 
considered that it would be better to sacrifice that 
futile spectacle and, in order to increase the yield 
of the soil, to dam the waters of the Nile by 
an artificial barrage: a work of solid masonry 
which (in the words of the Programme of Pleas- 
ure Trips) " affords an interest of a very differ- 
ent nature and degree" {sic). 

But nevertheless Cook & Son — a business con- 
cern glossed with poetry, as all the world knows 
— have endeavoured to perpetuate the memory 
of the cataract by giving its name to a hotel of 
500 rooms, which as a result of their labours 
has been established opposite to those rocks — 
now reduced to silence — over which the old Nile 
used to seethe for so many centuries. " Cataract 
Hotel " — ^that gives the illusion still, does it not? 
— and looks remarkably well at the head of 
a sheet of notepaper. 

Cook & Son (Egypt Ltd.) have even gone 
so far as to conceive the idea that it would be 
original to give to their establishment a certain 
cachet of Islam. And the dining-room repro- 
duces (in imitation, of course — ^but then you 
must not expect the impossible) the interior of 
one of the mosques of Stamboul. At the luncheon 
hour it is one of the prettiest sights in the world 
to see, under this imitation holy cupola, all the 



2 8o Egypt 

little tables crowded with Cook's tourists of both 
sexes, the while a concealed orchestra strikes up §] 
the " Mattchiche." 

The dam, it is true, in suppressing the cataract 
has raised some thirty feet or so the level of the 
water upstream, and by so doing has submerged 
a certain Isle of Philae, which passed, absurdly 
enough, for one of the marvels of the world by 
reason of its great temple of Isis, surrounded by 
palm-trees. But between ourselves, one may say 
that the beautiful goddess was a little old-fash- 
ioned for our times. She and her mysteries had 
had their day. Besides, if there should be any 
chagrined soul who might regret the disappear- 
ance of the island, care has been taken to per- 
petuate the memory of it, in the same way as 
that of the cataract. Charming coloured post- 
cards, taken before the submerging of the island 
and the sanctuary, are on sale in all the book- 
shops along the quay. 

Oh! this quay of Assouan, already so British 
in its orderhness, its method! Nothing better 
cared for, nothing more altogether charming 
could be conceived. First of all there is the 
railway, which, passing between balustrades 
painted a grass-green, gives out its fascinating 
noise and joyous smoke. On one side is a row 
of hotels and shops, all European in character 
— hairdressers, perfumers, and nimierous dark 



A Town Promptly Embellished 281 

rooms for the use of the many amateur photog- 
raphers, who make a point of taking away 
with them photographs of their travelling com- 
panions grouped tastefully before some celebrated 
hypogeum. 

And then numerous cafes, where the whisky 
is of excellent quality. And, I ought to add, 
in justice to the result of the Entente Cordiale, 
you may see there, too, aligned in considerable 
quantities on the shelves, the products of those 
great French philanthropists, to whom indeed 
our generation does not render sufficient homage 
for all the good they have done to its stomach 
and its head. The reader will guess that I have 
named Pernod, Picon and Cusenier. 

It may be indeed that the honest fellahs and 
Nubians of the neighbourhood, so sober a little 
while ago, are apt to abuse these tonics a little. 
But that is the effect of novelty, and wiU pass. 
And anyhow, amongst us Europeans, there is 
no need to conceal the fact — for do we not all 
make use of it involuntarily? — ^that alcoholism is 
a powerful auxiliary in the propagation of our 
ideas, and that the dealer in wines and spirits con- 
stitutes a valuable vanguard pioneer for our 
Western civilisation. Races, insensibly depressed 
by the abuse of our " appetisers," become more 
supple, more easy to lead in the true path of 
progress and liberty. 



282 Egypt 

On this quay of Assouan, so carefully levelled, 
defiles briskly a continual stream of fair travellers 
ravishingly dressed as only those know how who 
have made a tour with Cook & Son (Egypt 
Ltd. ) . And along the Nile, in the shade of the 
young trees, planted with the utmost nicety and 
precision, the flower-beds and straight-cut turf 
are protected eflicaciously by means of wire-net- 
ting against certain acts of f orgetfulness to which 
dogs, alas, are only too much addicted. 

Here, too, everything is ticketed, everything 
has its number: the donkeys, the donkey-drivers, 
the stations even where they are allowed to 
stand — " Stand for six donkeys, stand for ten, 
etc." Some very handsome camels, fitted with 
riding saddles, wait also in their respective places 
and a number of Cook ladies, meticulous on the 
point of local colour, even when it is merely a 
question of making some purchases in the town, 
readily mount for some moments one or other of 
these " ships of the desert." 

And at every fifty yards a policeman, still 
Egyptian in his countenance, but quite English 
in his bearing and costume, keeps a vigilant eye 
on everything — ^would never suffer, for example, 
that an eleventh donkey should dare to take a 
place in a stand for ten, which was already full. 

Certain people, inclined to be critical, might 
consider, perhaps, that these policemen were a 



A Town Promptly Embellished 283 

little too ready to chide their fellow-country- 
men; whereas on the contrary they showed 
themselves very respectful and obliging when- 
ever they were addressed by a traveller in a 
cork helmet. But that is in virtue of an equit- 
able and logical principle, derived by them from 
the high places of the new administration — 
namely, that the Egypt of to-day belongs far 
less to the Egyptians than to the noble foreigners 
who have come to brandish there the torch of 
civilisation. 

In the evening, after dark, the really respect- 
able travellers do not quit the brilliant dining 
saloons of the hotels, and the quay is left quite 
solitary beneath the stars. It is at such a time that 
one is able to realise how extremely hospitable 
certain of the natives are become. If, in an hour 
of melancholy, you walk alone on the bank of 
the Nile, smoking a cigarette, you will not fail to 
be accosted by one of these good people, who, 
misunderstanding the cause of the unrest in your 
soul, offers eagerly, and with a touching frank- 
ness, to introduce you to the gayest of the young 
ladies of the country. 

In the other towns, which still remain purely 
Egyptian, the people would never practise such 
an excess of affability and good manners, which 
have been learnt, beyond all question, from om* 
beneficent contact. 



284. Egypt 

Assouan possesses also its little Oriental bazaar 
— a little improvised, a little new perhaps; but 
then one, at least, was needed, and that as quickly 
as possible, in order that nothing might be want- 
ing to the tourists. 

The shopkeepers have contrived to provision 
themselves (in the leading shops, under the 
arcades of the Rue de Rivoli) with as much tact 
as good taste, and the Cook ladies have the in- 
nocent illusion of making bargains every day. 
One may even buy there, hung up by the tail, 
stuffed with straw and looking extremely real, 
the last crocodiles of Egypt, which, particularly 
at the end of the season, may be had at very 
advantageous prices. 

Even the old Nile has allowed itself to be 
fretted and brought up to date in the progress of 
evolution. 

First, the women, draped in black veils, who 
come daily to draw the precious water, have for- 
saken the fragile amphorse of baked earth, which 
had come to them from barbarous times — and 
which the Orientalists grossly abused in their 
pictures; and in their stead have taken to old tin 
oil-cans, placed at their disposal by the kindness 
of the big hotels. But they carry them in the 
same easy graceful manner as erstwhile the dis- 
carded pottery, and without losing in the least 
the gracious tanagrine outline. 



A Town Promptly Embellished 285 

And then there are the great tourist boats of 
the Agencies, which are here in abundance, for 
Assouan has the privilege of being the terminus 
of the Hne; and their whisthngs, their revolving 
motors, their electric dynamos maintain from 
morning till night a captivating symphony. It 
might be urged perhaps against these structures 
that they resemble a little the washhouses on the 
Seine; but the Agencies, desirous of restoring to 
them a certain local colour, have given them 
names so notoriously Egyptian that one is re- 
duced to silence. They are called Sesostris, 
Amenophis or Ramses the Great. 

And finally there are the rowing boats, which 
carry passengers incessantly backwards and for- 
wards between the river-banks. So long as the 
season remains at its height they are bedecked 
with a number of little flags of red cotton-cloth, 
or even of simple paper. The rowers, moreover, 
have been instructed to sing all the time the 
native songs which are accompanied by a der- 
boucca player seated in the prow. Nay, they 
have even learnt to utter that rousing, stimulat- 
ing cry which Anglo-Saxons use to express their 
enthusiasm or their joy: "Hip! hip! hurrah!" 
and you cannot conceive how well it sounds, com- 
ing between the Arab songs, which otherwise 
might be apt to grow monotonous. 



286 Egypt 

But the triumph of Assouan is its desert. It 
begins at once without transition as soon as you 
pass the close-cropped turf of the last square. A 
desert which, except for the railroad and the 
telegraph poles, has all the charm of the real 
thing: the sand, the chaos of overthrown stones, 
the empty horizons — everything, in short, save 
the immensity and infinite solitude, the horror, in 
a word, which formerly made it so little desirable. 
■It is a little astonishing, it must be owned, to 
find, on arriving there, that the rocks have been 
carefully numbered in white paint, and in some 
cases marked with a large cross " which catches 
the eye from a greater distance still " (sic). But 
I agree that the effect of the whole has lost 
nothing. 

' In the morning before the sun gets too hot, 
between breakfast and luncheon to be precise, 
all the good ladies in cork helmets and blue 

V 

" spectacles (dark-coloured spectacles are recom- 
mended on account of the glare) spread them- 
selves over these solitudes, domesticated as it 

*were to their use, with as much security as in 
Trafalgar Square or Kensington Gardens. Not 
seldom even you may see one of them making 
her way alone, book in hand, towards one of the 
picturesque rocks — No. 363, for example, or No. 
364, if you like it better — which seems to be mak- 

\ing signs to her with its white ticket, in a manner 



A Town Promptly Embellished 287 

which, to the uninitiated observer, might seem 
even a httle improper. 

But what a sense of safety famihes may feel 
here, to be sure! In spite of the huge numbers, 
which at first sight look a little equivocal, noth- 
ing in the least degree reprehensible can happen 
among these granites; which are, moreover, in 
a single piece, without the least crack or hole 
into which the straggler could contrive to crawl. 
No. The figures and the crosses denote simply 
blocks of stones, covered with hieroglyphics, and 
correspond to a chaste catalogue where each 
Pharaonic inscription may be found translated 
in the most becoming language. 

This ingenious ticketing of the stones of the 
desert is due to the initiative of an English 
Egyptologist. 



THE PASSING 
OF PHILiE 



CHAPTER XX 

THE PASSING OF PHILiE 

Leaving Assouan — as soon as we have passed 
the last house — ^we come at once upon the desert. 
And now the night is falhng, a cold February 
night, under a strange, copper-coloured sky. 

Incontestably it is the desert, with its chaos 
of granite and sand, its warm tones and reddish 
colour. But there are telegraph poles and the 
lines of a railroad, which traverse it in company, 
and disappear in the empty horizon. And then 
too how paradoxical and ridiculous it seems to be 
travelling here on full security and in a carriage ! 
(The most commonplace of hackney-carriages, 
which I hired by the hour on the quay of As- 
souan.) A desert indeed which preserves still its 
aspects of reality, but has become domesticated 
and tamed for the use of the tourists and the ladies. 

First, immense cemeteries surrounded by sand 
at the beginning of these quasi-solitudes. Such 
old cemeteries of every epoch of history. The 
thousand little cupolas of saints of Islam are 
crumbling side by side with the Christian obelisks 
of the first centuries ; and, underneath, the Phara- 
onic hypogea. In the twilight, all these ruins of 
291 



292 Egypt 

the dead, all the scattered blocks of granite are 
mingled in mournful groupings, outlined in fan- 
tastic silhouette against the pale copper of the 
sky; broken arches, tilted domes, and rocks that 
rise up like tall phantoms. 

Farther on, when we have left behind this 
region of tombs, the granites alone litter the 
expanse of sand, granites to which the usury of 
centuries has given the form of huge round 
beasts. In places they have been thrown one 
upon the other and make great heaps of monsters. 
Elsewhere they lie alone among the sands, as if 
lost in the midst of the infinitude of some dead 
sea-shore. The rails and the telegraph poles have 
disappeared; by the magic of the twilight every- 
thing is become grand again, beneath one of 
those evening skies of Egypt which, in winter, 
resemble cold cupolas of metal. And now it is 
that you feel yourself verily on the threshold of 
the profound desolations of Arabia, from which 
no barrier, after all, separates you. Were it not 
for the lack of verisimilitude in the carriage 
that has brought us hither, we should be able 
now to take this desert quite seriously — for in 
fact it has no limits. 

After travelling for about three quarters of an 
hour, we see in the distance a number of lights, 
which have already been kindled in the growing 
darkness. They seem too bright to be those of 



The Passing of Philae 293 

an Arab encampment. And our driver tm^ning 
round and pointing' to them says: " Chelal! " 

Chelal — that is the name of the Arab village, 
on the riverside, where you take the boat for 
Philse. To our disgust the place is lighted by 
electricity. It consists of a station, a factory 
with a long smoking chimney, and a dozen or so 
suspicious -looking taverns, reeking of alcohol, 
without which, it would seem, our European 
civilisation could not implant itself in a new 
country. 

And here we embark for Philse. A number 
of boats are ready: for the tourists allured by 
many advertisements flock hither every winter 
in docile herds. All the boats, without a single 
exception, are profusely decorated with little 
English flags, as if for some regatta on the 
Thames. There is no escape therefore from this 
beflagging of a foreign holiday — and we set out 
with a homesick song of Nubia, which the boat- 
men sing to the cadence of the oars. 

The copper-coloured heaven remains so im- 
pregnated with cold light that we still see clearly. 
We are amid magnificent tragic scenery on a 
lake surrounded by a kind of fearful amphi- 
theatre outlined on all sides by the mountains of 
the desert. It was at the bottom of this granite 
circus that the Nile used to flow, forming fresh 
islets, on which the eternal verdure of the palm- 



294 Egypt 

trees contrasted with the high desolate mountains 
that surrounded it hke a wall. To-day, on ac- 
count of the barrage established by the English, 
the water has steadily risen, like a tide that will 
never recede; and this lake, almost a little sea, 
replaces the meanderings of the river and has 
succeeded in submerging the sacred islets. The 
sanctuary of Isis — ^which was enthroned for thou- 
sands of years on the summit of a hill, crowded 
with temples and colonnades and statues — still 
half emerges ; but it is alone and will soon go the 
way of the others. There it is, beyond, like a 
great rock, at this hour in which the night begins 
to obscure everything. 

Nowhere but in Upper Egypt have the winter 
nights these transparencies of absolute emptiness 
nor these sinister colourings. As the light grad- 
ually fails, the sky passes from copper to 
bronze, but remains always metallic. The zenith 
becomes brownish like a brazen shield, while the 
setting sun alone retains its yellow colour, grow- 
ing slowly paler till it is almost of the whiteness 
of latten ; and, above, the mountains of the desert 
edge their sharp outlines with a tint of burnt 
sienna. To-night a freezing wind blows fiercely 
in our faces. To the continual chant of the 
rowers we pass slowly over the artificial lake, 
which is upheld as it were in the air by the 
English masonry, invisible now in the distance. 



The Passing of Philae 295 

but divined nevertheless and revolting. A sac- 
rilegious lake one might call it, since it hides 
beneath its troubled waters ruins beyond all 
price; temples of the gods of Egypt, churches 
of the first centuries of Christianity, obelisks, 
inscriptions and emblems. It is over these things 
that we now pass, while the spray splashes in 
our faces, and the foam of a thousand angry lit- 
tle billows. 

We draw near to what was once the holy isle. 
In places dying palm-trees, whose long trunks are 
to-day under water, stiU show their moistened 
plumes and give an appearance of inundation, 
almost of cataclysm. 

Before coming to the sanctuary of Isis, we 
touch at the kiosk of Philae, which has been 
reproduced in the pictures of every age, and is 
as celebrated even as the Sphinx and the pyra- 
mids. It used to stand on a pedestal of high 
rocks, and around it the date-trees swayed their 
bouquets of aerial palms. To-day it has no 
longer a base; its columns rise separately from 
this kind of suspended lake. It looks as if it 
had been constructed in the water for the purpose 
of some royal naumachy. We enter with our 
boat — a strange port indeed, in its ancient 
grandeur; a port of a nameless melancholy, par- 
ticularly at this yellow hour of the closing twi- 
light, and under these icy winds that come to 



296 Egypt 

us mercilessly from the neighbouring deserts. 
And yet how adorable it is, this kiosk of Philse, 
in this the abandonment that precedes its down- 
fall! Its columns placed, as it were, upon some- 
thing unstable, become thereby more slender, 
seem to raise higher still the stone foliage of 
their capitals. A veritable kiosk of dreamland 
now, which one feels is about to disappear for 
ever under these waters which will subside no 
more ! 

And now, for another few moments, it grows 
quite light again, and tints of a warmer copper 
reappear in the sky. Often in Egypt when the 
sun has set and you think the light is gone, this 
furtive recoloration of the air comes thus to sur- 
prise you, before the darkness finally descends. 
The reddish tints seem to return to the slender 
shafts that surround us, and also, beyond, to the 
temple of the goddess, standing there like a sheer 
rock in the middle of this little sea, which the 
wind covers with foam. 

On leaving the kiosk our boat — on this deep 
usurping water, among the submerged palm-trees 
— makes a detour in order to lead us to the temple 
by the road which the pilgrims of olden times 
used to travel on foot — by that way which, a little 
while ago, was still magnificent, bordered with 
colonnades and statues. But now the road is 
entirely submerged, and will never be seen again. 



The Passing of Philae 297 

Between its double row of columns the water lifts 
us to the height of the capitals, which alone 
emerge and which we could touch with our hands. 
It seems like some journey of the end of time, in 
a kind of deserted Venice, which is about to topple 
over, to sink and be forgotten. 

We arrive at the temple. Above our heads 
rise the enormous pylons, ornamented with fig- 
ures in bas-relief: an Isis who stretches out her 
arms as if she were making signs to us, and nu- 
merous other divinities gesticulating mysteriously. 
The door which opens in the thickness of these 
walls is low, besides being half flooded, and 
gives on to depths already in darkness. We 
row on and enter the sanctuary, and as soon as 
our boat has crossed the sacred threshold the 
boatmen stop their song and suddenly give voice 
to the new cry that has been taught them for the 
benefit of the tourists: "Hip! hip! hip! hur- 
rah! " Coming at this moment, when, with 
heart oppressed by all the utilitarian vandalism 
that surrounds us, we were entering the sanc- 
tuary, what an effect of gross and imbecile prof- 
anation this bellowing of Enghsh joy produces! 
The boatmen know, moreover, that they have 
been displaced, that their day has gone for ever; 
perhaps even, in the depths of their Nubian souls, 
they understand us, for all that we have imposed 
silence on them. The darkness increases within. 



298 Egypt 

although the place is open to the sky, and the 
icy wind blows more mournfully than it did out- 
side. A penetrating humidity — a humidity al- 
together unknown in this country before the 
inundation — chills us to the bone. We are now 
in that part of the temple which was left un- 
covered, the part where the faithful used to kneel. 
The sonority of the granites round about ex- 
aggerates the noise of the oars on the enclosed 
water, and there is something confusing in the 
thought that we are rowing and floating between 
the walls where formerly, and for centuries, men 
were used to prostrate themselves with their fore- 
heads on the stones. 

And now it is quite dark; the hour grows 
late. We have to bring the boat close to the 
walls to distinguish the hieroglyphs and rigid 
gods which are engraved there as finely as by the 
burin. These walls, washed for nearly four years 
by the inundation, have already taken on at the 
base that sad blackish colour which may be seen 
on the old Venetian palaces. 

Halt and silence. It is dark and cold. The 
oars no longer move, and we hear only the 
sighing of the wind and the lapping of the water 
against the columns and the bas-reliefs — and then 
suddenly there comes the noise of a heavy body 
falling, followed by endless eddies. A great 
carved stone has plunged, at its due hour, to 



The Passing of Philae 299 

rejoin in the black chaos below its fellows that 
have already disappeared, to rejoin the sub- 
merged temples and old Coptic churches, and the 
town of the first Christian centuries — all that was 
once the Isle of Philse, the " pearl of Egypt," one 
of the marvels of the world. 

The darkness is now extreme and we can see 
no longer. Let us go and shelter, no matter 
where, to await the moon. At the end of this 
uncovered hall there opens a door which gives on 
to deep night. It is the holy of holies, heavily 
roofed with granite, the highest part of the 
temple, the only part which the waters have not 
yet reached, and there we are able to put foot to 
earth. Our footsteps resound noisily on the large 
resonant flags, and the owls take to flight. Pro- 
found darkness ; the wind and the dampness freeze 
us. Three horn's to go before the rising of the 
moon; to wait in this place would be our death. 
Rather let us retimi to Chelal, and shelter our- 
selves in any lodging that offers, however 
wretched it may be. 

A tavern of the horrible village in the light 
of an electric lamp. It reeks of absinthe, this 
desert tavern, in which we warm ourselves at a 
little smoking fire. It has been hastily built of 
old tin boxes, of the debris of whisky cases, and 
by way of miu-al decoration the landlord, an 



300 Egypt 

ignorant Maltese, has pasted everywhere pictures 
cut from our European pornographic news- 
papers. During our hours of waiting, Nubians 
and Arabians follow one another hither, asking 
for drink, and are supplied with brimming glass- 
fuls of our alcoholic beverages. They are the 
workers in the new factories who were formerly 
healthy beings, living in the open air. But now 
their faces are stained with coal dust, and their 
haggard eyes look unhappy and ill. 
• •••••• 

The rising of the moon is fortunately at hand. 
Once more in our boat we make our way slowly 
towards the sad rock which to-day is Philae. 
The wind has fallen with the night, as happens 
almost invariably in this country in winter, and 
the lake is calm. To the mournful yellow sky 
has succeeded one that is blue-black, infinitely 
distant, where the stars of Egypt scintillate in 
myriads. 

A great glimmering light shows now in the 
east and at length the full moon rises, not blood- 
coloured as in our climates but straightway very 
luminous, and surrounded by an aureole of a kind 
of mist, caused by the eternal dust of the sands. 
And when we return to the baseless kiosk — lulled 
always by the Nubian song of the boatmen 
— a great disc is already illuminating everything 
with a gentle splendour. As our little boat winds 



The Passing of Philae 301 

in and out, we see the great ruddy disc pass- 
ing and repassing between the high columns, so 
striking in their archaism, whose images are 
repeated in the water, that is now grown cahn — 
more than ever a kiosk of dreamland, a kiosk of 
old-world magic. 

In returning to the temple of the goddess, we 
follow for a second time the submerged road be- 
tween the capitals and friezes of the colonnade 
which emerge like a row of little reefs. 

In the uncovered hall which forms the entrance 
to the temple, it is still dark between the sovereign 
granites. Let us moor our boat against one of 
the walls and await the good pleasure of the 
moon. As soon as she shall have risen high 
enough to cast her light here, we shall see 
clearly. 

It begins by a rosy glimmer on the summit 
of the pylons; and then takes the form of a 
luminous triangle, very clearly defined, which 
grows gradually larger on the immense wall. 
Little by little it descends towards the base of 
the temple, revealing to us by degrees the in- 
timidating presence of the bas-reliefs, the gods, 
goddesses and hieroglyphs, and the assemblies 
of people who make signs among themselves. 
We are no longer alone — a whole world of 
phantoms has been evoked around us by the 
moon, some little, some very large. They had 



302 Egypt 

been hiding there in the shadow and now sud- 
denly they recommence their mute conversa- 
tions, without breaking the profound silence, 
using only their expressive hands and raised 
fingers. And now also the colossal Isis begins 
to appear — ^the one carved on the left of the 
portico by which you enter; first, her refined 
head with its bird's helmet, surmounted by a 
solar disc; then, as the light continues to 
descend, her neck and shoulders, and her arm, 
raised to make who knows what mysterious, 
indicating sign; and finally the slim nudity of 
her torso, and her hips close bound in a sheath. 
Behold her now, the goddess, come completely 
out of the shadow. . . . But she seems surprised 
and disturbed at seeing at her feet, instead of the 
stones she had known for two thousand years, her 
own likeness, a reflection of herself, that stretches 
away, reversed in the mirror of the water. . . . 

And suddenly, in the midst of the deep noc- 
turnal calm of this temple, isolated here in the 
lake, comes again the sound of a kind of mourn- 
ful booming, of things that topple, precious 
stones that become detached and fall — and then, 
on the surface of the lake, a thousand concentric 
circles form, chase one another and disappear, 
ruffling indefinitely this mirror embanked between 
the terrible granites, in which Isis regards herself 
sorrowfully. 



■ 



The Passing of Philae 303 

Postscript. — The submerging of Philae, as we 
know, has increased by no less than seventy-five 
millions of pounds the annual yield of the sur- 
rounding land. Encouraged by this success, the 
English propose next year to raise the barrage 
of the Nile another twenty feet. As a conse- 
quence this sanctuary of Isis will be completely 
submerged, the greater part of the ancient 
temples of Nubia will be under water, and fever 
will infect the country. But, on the other hand, 
the cultivation of cotton will be enormously 
facilitated. . . . 



Index 



Abortions, Egyptian belief re- 
specting, 49 
A.bydos 

— antiquity of, 135 

— country on the way to, 131-132 

— necropoles of 
extent of, 140 

fascination of, for the Egyp- 
tians, 134 
site of, 133 

— temples to Osiris at, 135-136, 
138-139, 141-144 

Alexander the Great, 185 
Amasis, King, 85 
Amen, God 

— Hypostyle Hall dedicated to, 
at Thebes, 195, 207, 213, 215- 
217, 223-224, 264 

— palaces of, at Thebes, 211 

— ritual procession of, in temple 
at Luxor, 185-186 

— " Sovereign Master of Life and 
Eternity," 196 

Amenemhat, King, 10 
Amenophis II., 183, 237 

— "Double" of, 250-252 

— mummy of, 255-256 

— tomb of, 245-248, 252-257 

frescoes in, 247-248 

Amenophis III., 265 note 
Anubis (jackal-headed god), 143, 

247 
Apis, an emanation from the Ail- 
Pbwerful, 196 

— coffins of, 85-86 

— tombs of, 77, 84-87 
Assouan, 277-287 

— bazaar at, 284 

— dam at, 279, 280, 294, 303 

— desert at, 286-287, 291-292 

— quay of, 280-283 

— tourist boats at, 285 

Baekuk (Mameluke Sultan), 
tomb of, 101 



Basilica of St Sergius 

— antiquity of, 114 

— crypt of, 105-107 

— entrance to, 111-112 

— interior of, 112-113 

— location of, 108, 110 
Bas-relief of Emperor Nero, 173 
Bas-reliefs in temples at Abydos, 

135-136, 138-139, 142-144 

— grace and purity of, 143 

— lack of perspective and fore- 
shortening in, 143-144 

— marvellous preservation of, 139, 
142-144 

Bas-reliefs in Temple of Hathor, 
168, 170, 172-173 

— decadence of, 170 
Bas-reliefs in Temple of Isis, 301 

— in temple at Luxor, ritual 
procession of God Amen, 185- 
186 

— at Thebes, 218 

— in tomb of Amenophis II., 256 
Beasts and plants, their persistence 

of type, 188 
Beasts, sacred, mummies of, 48 
Bull, Apis. See Apis 



Caieo 

— cemetery, modern, at, by night, 
95-98 

— citadel, view of, from, 21-23 

— "City of Mosques," the, 31 

— new town, the, 25-26 

— old town, the, 23-25 
Caliphs, Fatimee, 61 
Cambyses, King, 86 

— soldiers of, and destruction of 
Thebes, 230 

Cataract at Assouan, 277, 279 
Cataract Hotel, Assouan, 279 
Cat-headed Goddess (The Ogress), 
268, 272-273 

— Temple of, 271-273 



o6 



Index 



Cat-headed goddesses, 261, 266- 

268 
Chah Zade, 19 
Chelal, 293 

— tavern at, 299-300 
Cheops, Pyramid of, 7-9 
Christ, image of, in temple at 

Luxor, 184 
Christianity in Egypt, its rapid 

growth and persistence, 107-108 
Christians and the destruction of 

Thebes, 197 
Citadel, the, at Cairo, 17, 18 
Climate of Egypt, change in, 5, 6 
Colossi 

— Luxor, at, 187-190 

— Memnon, of, 240, 245 

— Thebes, at, 262-265 
Columns 

— Abydos, at, 142 

— Luxor, at, 183-184, 186-187, 
239 

— mosques, of the, 36 

— " plant-column," 142 

— Thebes, at, 216-217, 225-226 
Coptic Mass in Basilica of St 

Sergius, 106, 113-114 

— Church. See Basilica of St 
Sergius 

Copts 

— precedence in Christianity, 107- 
108 

— simplicity of, 112, 115 

— women, dress of. 111 

Crypt of Basilica of St Sergius, 
105-107 

— antiquity of, 107 

Dahabiya, 152-154, 158-159, 177, 

179, 181, 238 
Dam, Nile, at Assouan, 279, 280, 

294, 303 
Dashur, Pyramids of, 153 
Death, Egyptian conception of, 

248-250 
Desert, the 

— Assouan, at, 286-287, 291-292 

— characteristic of, 94 

— proximity of, to Cairo, 93, 94 

— Libyan, 11, 132 

— Memphite, 78-82 
at night, 88-89 

— of the Sphinx, at night, 3-13 
Denderah, 172 

Divinities, Egyptian. See Bas- 
reliefs 



"Double" of Amenophis II., 250- 
252 

— of the mummy, Egyptian belief 
respecting, 249-250 

Easter Mass in Basihca of St 

Sergius, 106, 113-114 
Egypt, climate, change in, 5, 6 

— cost of upkeep, 25 

— spring in, 109-110 

Egypt, Pharaonic, and idea of di- 
vine unity, 196 

Egyptian peasants of to-day. See 
Fellahs 

— villages, neutral colour of, 124- 
125, 156-157 

El Azhar 

— (Moslem University), 61-73 

— courtyard of, 62-64 

— dependencies of, 66-67 

— duration of studies at, 70 note 

— mosque of, 62-63, 69-72 

— projected reform of, 73 

— students at; their diversity of 
type, 68 

Embahners 

— suburb of, at Thebes, 238-239 

— success of, doubtful, 51 

Fatimee Caliphs, 61 

Fatimites, 67, 73 

Fellah babies; their dirtiness, 122, 

123 
Fellahs 

— at the Shaduf, 119-121 

— their passivity and endurance, 
123 

— their eagerness to possess land, 
124 

— their refinement and courtesy, 
125-126 

— their degradation, 126 

— proposals for their awakening, 
126 

— and the exhumation of Thebes, 
227-229 

Fellah women; their grace, 121, 
122, 284 

— their strength, 123 
"Forms," in Museum at Cairo, 

Arab superstition respecting, 46 

Gabdens of the Mosque, 33-34 
Gizeh, Pyramids of, 4, 12, 23, 153 
God Amen. See Amen 



Index 



Z°7 



Goddess of Love and Joy, Temple 
of, 167-173 

— Hall of Mystery in, 169 

— preservation of, 168 
Goddess of War. See Sekhet 
Goddess of Lust. See Sekhet 

Hades, Book of, 248 

Hadith, verses from, 61, 62, 65, 67, 

72 
Hathor, Temple of, 167-173 

— bas-relief of Nero in, 173 

— bas-reliefs in, 168-170, 172-173 
Horus (falcon-headed god), 143, 

170 
Hypostyle Hall at Thebes, 195, 
207, 213, 215-217, 223-224, 
264 

ICONOSTASIS, 112-113 

Imams, 34, 40 

Irrigation, effect of, on climate, 

5, 6 
Isis, 143, 170, 280 

— colossal figure of, at Philae, 302 

— Temple of, at Philse, 297-299, 
301-302 

Islam, popular misconception re- 
specting, 72 

Kiosk of Phil^, 295-296, 301 
Kiosks, mortuary, attached to 

mosques, 36-38 
Koran, its rhythmic quality, 71 

Legrain, M., and the maintenance 
and restoration of Thebes, 228 
note 

Libyan Desert, the, 11, 132 

Life after death, Egyptian concep- 
tion of, 248-250 

Lioness-headed goddesses. See 
Cat-headed goddesses 

Luxor 

— quay of, 181-183 

— scene on arrival at, 180, 181 

— Temple of 

Chapel of Alexander the 

Great in, 185 

Christian cathedral in, 185 

colossi in, 187-189 

columns of, 183, 184, 186- 

187, 239 

midday in, 186 

statues of Ramses II. in, 189- 

190 



Luxor, Winter Palace at, 180 
239 

Makeri, Queen, mummy of, in 

museum at Cairo, 50, 58 

road of, at Thebes, 261 

Mameluke Sultans, tombs of 23 

98-101 
Mariette, M., the Egyptologist, 82, 

86 note 
Mass in Basilica of St Sergius, 100, 

113-114 
Mausoleums attached to the 

mosques, 36-38 
Mehemet Ah, catafalque of, 20 

— citadel of, 17-18 

— Mosque of, 17-21 

— Palace of, 17, 21 
Mehmet Fatih, 19 
Memnon, colossi of, 240, 245 
Memphis, Necropolis of, 77-89 

— Pyramids of, 23, 78, 80, 89 
Memphite Desert, 78-82 

at night, 88-89 

Mihrab, 34 and note, 35, 66 
Mokattam, the, 17 
Moonrise at Philse, 300-301 

— at Thebes, 217-219 
Mosaic work in mosques, 35 
Moslem iconoclasts and destruc- 
tion of Thebes, 197 

— University. See El Azhar 
Mosque of Mehemet Ali, 17-21 
Mosques of Cairo, compared with 

those of Morocco, Persia and 
Turkey, 38 

— gardens of, 33, 34 

— peacefulness and quiet in, 32, 33 

— sanctuaries of, 85, 36 

— work of restoration, 39 
Munmiied viands in tombs, 250 
Mummies in tomb of Amenophis 

II., 252-254 

— of ancestors, Egyptian pre- 
occupation as to safe hiding of, 
52 

— suburb of preparers of, at 
Thebes, 238-239 

— unswathed, in museum at 
Cairo, 51-57 

Museum of Egyptian Antiquities at 
Cairo, 43-58 

— precautions against fire in, 45, 
49 

Mustapha Kamel Pacha, 65 
Mushrabiyas, 24, 33, 93, 110 



3o8 



Index 



;Mut, Goddess, Temple of, 266 note 
"Mysteiy, HaU of," in Temple of 
Goddess of Love and Joy, 169 

Necropoles, Egyptian, sites chos- 
en for, 140, 243 

— of Abydos, 133, 134, 135, 140 
Necropolis of Memphis, 78-89 
Nero, Emperor, bas-relief of, 173 
Nile, ascent of, 153-160 

— exploitation of, 152 

— history of, 149-152 

— profanation of, 156-157, 160 

— scenes on banks, 155-159 

— \allages on banks, 156-157 
Nile Valley, the 

— fertility of, 150 

— irrigation of, 5, 6 
Nsitanebashru, Queen, mmnmy of, 

55-58 

Obelisks, at Luxor, 187 

— at Thebes, 178, 213-214 
Ogress, the, 268, 272-273 

Temole of, 271-273 

"Old Cairo," 108, 109, 110 
Orientals; their modernity super- 
ficial, 66 

Osiris and Egyptian conception of 
death, 248-250 

— in bas-relief at Abydos, 143 

— head of, 134 

— lake of, 210 

— Temple of Ramses II. to, 138- 
139 

— Temple of Seti I. to, 135, 136, 
141-144 

Ospreys at night in Thebes, 213 
Owls at night in Thebes, 213 

Palaces of Amen, avenue of, at 
Thebes, 211 

Persian soldiers and the destruc- 
tion of Thebes, 230 

— and the tombs of the Apis, 86 
Philse, colossal figure of Isis at, 

302 

— embarkation for, 293 

— inundation of, 280, 294-298 

— Kiosk of, 295-296, 301 

— moonrise at, 300-301 

— "Pearl of Egypt," the, 299 

— Sanctuary of Isis at, 280, 294, 
297-299, 301, 302 

— submerged ruins at, 295 



Plough used by fellahs, antiquity 

of, 124 
Preparers of mummies, suburb of, 

at Thebes, 238, 239 

— success of, doubtful, 51 
Prophet, words of. See Hadith 
Pylons, 193, 201, 208, 211, 261-268 
Pyramid of Cheops, 7-9 

— Sakkarah, 153 
Pyramids of Dashur, 153 

— of Gizeh, 4, 12, 23, 153 

— of Memphis, 23, 78, 80, 89 

Ramses, Colonnade of, at Thebes, 

230 
Ramses II. (Sesostris), likeness of, 

as a child, 144 

— mummy of, at Cairo, 51, 52-54 

— statues of, at Luxor, 189-190 

— Temple of, at Abydos, 138, 139 

— tomb of, at Thebes, 244 
Ramses III., mummy of, at Cairo, 

51 
Ramses IV., mummy of, at Cairo, 
51 

— tomb of, at Thebes, 244 
Ramses IX., tomb of, at Thebes, 

244 
Romans, remains of colonial towns 
of, 166 

— and the Temple of Hathor, 1 69- 
170, 173 

— and the restoration of Thebes, 
224 

St Sergius, Basilica of, 108, Hi- 
ll 2, 113-114 

— crypt of, 105-107 
Sakkarah, Pyramid of, 153 
Sanctuaries of the mosques 

— columns in, 36 

— decoration of, 35 

— mihrab in, 34 and note, 35 
Sanctuaries of Osiris at Abydos, 

131, 135-144 
Screech-owls at night in Thebes, 

213 
Sekhet, Goddess, 266, 268, 272-273 

— Temple of, 271, 273 
Sesostris. See Ramses II. 
Seti I., likeness of, 144 

— mummy of, at Cairo, 51, 55 

— and the Temple of Amen at 
Thebes, 196 

— temple of, to Osiris, 135-136, 
141-144 



Ind 



ex 



Setl I., tomb of, 244 

Seti II., mummy of, at Cairo, 51 

Setnakht, King, 251 

Shaduf, description of, 119, 120 

— song of, 119 

Soul, the, Egyptian belief respect- 
ing, 248-249 
Sphinx, the 

— appearance of, 9, 10 

— at night, 3, 4 

— beauty of, 11 

— identity of, 10 

— "Little Desert of," 79, 80 

— secret of, 12, 13 
Spring in Egypt, 109, 110 
Strabo; his description of Temple 

of King Seti at Abydos, 141 
Summer solstice, evening of, at 

Thebes, 226-227 
Sun god, the, 10 

Temple 

— goddess of Love and Joy, of, 
167-173 

— Hathor, of, 167-173 

— Isis, of, 297-299, 301-302 

— Luxor, at, 183-190 

— Mut, Goddess, of, 266 note 

— Ogress, the, of, 271-273 

— Osiris, of, 135-136, 138-139, 
141-144 

— Ramses IL, of, at Abydos, 138- 
139 

— Seti I., of, at Abydos, 135, 136, 
141-144 

— Thebes, at, buried temples, 228- 
229 

^Hypostyle Hall, the, 195, 207, 

213, 215-217, 223-224, 264 
Tewfik, Khedive, 53 
Thebes 

— at daybreak, 178-179 

— at moonrise, 217-219 

— at night, 207-220 

— at sunset, 193, 200-202 

— boundary of, 263 



309 

Thebes, buried temples at, 228-229 

— destruction of, by Christians and 
Moslem iconoclasts, 197 

— earthquakes at, 212 

— excavations at, 227-229 

— extent of, 231-232 

— history of, 194-198 

— Hypostyle Hall at, 195, 207, 
213, 215-217, 223-224, 264 

— obelisks at, 178, 213-214 

— men of, their architectural 
achievement, 225 

their ignorance of the vault, 

225 
then* influence on posterity, 

J. kjO 

— suburb of embalmers at, 238- 
239 

— want of clear space in temples 
at, 225 

Thoth, ibis-headed god, 143 
Thothmes III., hall of the feasts 
of, 211-212, 216, 264 

— tomb of, 244 

Tourist boats, 160, 181, 285 

"Valley of the Kings," at 

Thebes, 242, 243, 248 
Valley of the Nile. See Nile 

Valley 
Vault, undiscovered by Thebans, 

225 
Villages, Egyptian, their neutral 

colour, 124-125, 156-157 
Virgin Mary, and the Crypt of 

Basilica of St Sergius, 107 

WiNTEE Palace, at Luxor, 180, 

239 
Women (Copts), dress of. 111 

— (fellaheen) dress of, 121, 122 

grace of, 121, 122, 284 

strength of, 123 

Zade, Chah, 19 

Zoser, King, tomb of, 80 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: iVIay 2003 

PreservatioiiTechnologies 



